Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/10/o-melhor.html
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Portugal has provided the world with an example of reasonable drug laws. It is good to see that they are moving ahead with more policy based on the common good rather than basing policy on who provides the most campaign contributions.
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Has Trump neglected to appoint a US Trade Representative? That’s the only logical explanation. Under Obama, Portugal would never have been permitted this bit of autonomy.
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This is the way I see it:
Currently, copyright owners / distributors have to give access to the DRM’d content by depositing the DRM keys on some government agency, so the people can access the content for legal uses (exceptions).
I own a DVD and I want to take a clip of it to show on the class to my students? That’s what I’m supposed to do if there’s DRM on the DVD.
Problem: Copyright owners / distributors don’t do it, never did, never will.
So this law says that if that happens and people are unable to enjoy their legal uses, the DRM shall not have the protection of the law in such cases. Meaning that the person would not be in trouble for breaking or going around it.
But it still has the same problem as the Norwegian example in the text.
PS: If anyone in Portugal happens to read this, please check this out: https://direitosdigitais.pt/ (a brand new association for digital rights).
Maybe people should keep schtum about Portugal.
What’re ya tryin’ to do? Get it ‘liberated’ or sump’n?
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Vive la resistance!
It’s been legal to break DRM in France for interoperation purpose since 2006: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/21/france_drm_interop/ it’s been actively used to allow porting DVD and BR players to linux…
the German law has a similar limitation on copyrights - it’s legal to decompile programs and use the found infos to make a different program interoperable with the decompiled one. iirc Sernet uses/used this for the contributions to Samba when poking around in Microsoft’s implementation of SMB.
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