Comment DMCA part of complaint looks weak (Score 3, Interesting) 32
Reddit might have a good complaint about terms of service or CFAA or something. I don't know. But at least one part of their complaint looks like garbage:
7. Congress has enacted laws to prevent exactly what Defendants are doing:
circumventing or bypassing technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted
works. See Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq. Each of the Defendants
in this action is profiting by evading technological control measures to access Reddit data it
knows it does not have permission to access or use. Because Reddit has always believed in the
open internet, it takes its role as a steward of its users’ communities, discussions, and authentic
human discourse seriously. Through this action, Reddit seeks to end Defendants’ circumvention
of security measures protecting Reddit data, blatant misuse of Reddit content, and disrespect for
its users’ rights, all of which harm Reddit and its hundreds of thousands of authentic human
communities.
Ah, DMCA, my old friend. Let's review some DCMA definitions from 1201(a)(3), but I'll add some emphasis:
(3) As used in this subsection—
(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
It is here that I must mention that I happen to have a reddit account, and I am somewhat familiar with that website. And I never, ever authorized any technological measure to limit access to my posts/comments. That doesn't mean reddit can't do it, but reddit never asked me and I never authorized it, so whatever is being circumvented does not, therefore (by DMCA's own words), "effectively control access to a work" because the technological measure was never authorized by the copyright owner. I suspect that no reddit users have authorized this, or at most, only reddit employees have been ordered by their bosses to authorize it.
Furthermore, how do we know that the copyright owners don't authorize anyone to "avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure" their copyrighted works? I authorize people to do that. (Indeed, my Slashdot sig below, is a reference to that.) I don't think I have ever said on reddit that I authorize it (the way i have done here on Slashdot) but if anyone (reddit?!?) ever bothers to ask me...
There seems to be some popular misunderstanding of DMCA, that it prohibits cracking DRM. But that's only true if the copyright owner authorized the DRM in the first place and also if they don't authorizing cracking it. Neither of those two required conditions apply in this case.
