• ysjet@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.

    Oh you sweet summer child, judges will bend over backwards to slap people with multi-decade-to-life charges for ‘hacking,’ even if the ‘hacking’ is just the rightsholder accidentally presenting data to you.

    • tomkatt@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      To be fair, if you OCR the pages via camera, you haven’t actually circumvented DRM. That means it’s a completely legal backup, as the DRM on the original file was untouched and unaltered. This definitely does fall under fair use.

      • ysjet@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Theoretically, yes. Realistically, judges historically believe anything prosecutors tell them about hacking and circumvention.

        There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.

        • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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          6 hours ago

          There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.

          Source?
          The closest i’ve heard was a journalist being accused of hacking for the crime of choosing “view source” in the right-click menu of a web-browser.

          • ysjet@lemmy.world
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            10 hours ago

            Looks like I mixed up two different cases- the cause of one, and the duration of another.

            weev (who apparently is a giant asshole) was the one who got sent to jail for accessing a completely public URL AT&T wished he didn’t in 2010. The EFF took up his case. His sentence was later vacated by another court because so many civil rights lawyers kept joining his team pro-bono so the court tossed it out on a blatant technicality to get the issue to go away, so he only served ~2y.

            As for the CFAA being used to slap people with life sentences, there’s too many examples to know which one I was mixing it up with. Aaron Swartz is the classic example.

            • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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              6 hours ago

              so he only served ~2y.

              Still 2y more than he should’ve, geez…

      • dermanus@lemmy.ca
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        16 hours ago

        You didn’t circumvent it by breaking the encryption, but I’d say you still circumvented it.