Digital Home Thoughts: Sorry Bloggers, the DMCA Will Not Crumble Here Today

"On Friday, a Federal Court of Appeals judge issued a ruling with potentially important implications for music and movie rippers. In the case of MGE UPS Systems Inc. vs GE Consumer and Industrial Inc, the court ruled that GE employees did not violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) when they bypassed security dongles in order to repair some of MGE's uninterruptible power supplies."

The DMCA, the most frustrating piece of legislation ever written from a technology geek perspective, isn't going anywhere just yet. Laptop Magazine's Avram Piltch (is it me, or does that sound like the name of a Harry Potter character?) nails the issue exactly: there's no encryption being broken here. It would be akin to your DVD player at home needing a special dongle to start up, but the DVD you're putting in for playback having no encryption on it whatsoever. That's not the way things work though, and thus the DMCA hasn't been overruled. Like every other blogger writing about this, I'm not a lawyer either, but I think the judge understood exactly what he was doing with this ruling.