Is It A DMCA Violation To Tell People To Delete Some Files From Their Hard Drive?
One of the worst parts of the DMCA is the “anti-circumvention” law that makes it illegal to help people get around any kind of copy protection. First of all, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone might want to get around copy protection — but, more importantly, if someone is violating copyrights by getting around copy protection, then they should be liable, rather than the person who showed them how to get around the copy protection. However, that’s not how the DMCA is written — and because of that, we get ridiculous situations like the following. A guy pointed out that if you delete a few files from your computer, the limitations on how many coupons you can print via coupons.com disappear. Coupons.com is responding by filing a DMCA lawsuit against him. Remember, he’s not hacking their software in any way. He’s just pointing out that their software protection scheme is so poorly designed, that deleting a few files renders it useless. And for that, he may be facing tremen
