>DMCA circumvention clause makes many types of fair use illegal.
> If you make a personal backup by circumventing digital access controls, you are not violating copyright but you are violating the DMCA; you are committing a crime.
It looks to me like self contradicting laws then. How are such cases legally resolved i.e. when law A directly contradicts law B? Fair use says it's legal. DMCA says it's illegal. What is correct then?
And fair use is not a "defense". It's a description of lawful legal actions which aren't affected by restrictions granted in limited monopoly of copyright to begin with.
While it is possible to argue about analogies til the end of days, I don't think your analogy quite captures the essence of what is going on with the DMCA.
Allow me to present a refinement:
There exists one law that says it is only legal to make a right turn on red if you stop and look to the right first. There exists another law that says if you stop on red, you can't look to the right. The net result is that in order to avoid breaking any laws, you can't make a right turn on red.
These laws are technically not contradictory, but the end result is to nullify the ability to turn left on red just as the DMCA nullifies the ability to make a copy for any reason, fair use or otherwise.
Why isn't then fair use applicable to DMCA? It's against the point of fair use - i.e. not to prevent sensible usage of the content like backups. If DMCA forbids it, fair use becomes totally useless idea. So I'd say from people's perspective - in cases of fair use DCMA should be ignored as an insane law.
OK, probably it's better to rephrase the question, since copyright law and fair use concept predate DMCA. Why DMCA didn't include provisions of being not applicable in cases of fair use from the copyright law perspective?
The point of fair use is obvious - to limit copyright restrictions for sensible use cases (like personal use, accessibility and so on). Comes along DMCA and claims that cases covered by fair use are illegal. Was it the intention all along, or it was a sneaky way to do it? Can't DMCA be challenged on this grounds as being invalid as is?
Isn't DMCA unconstitutional as is? It restricts free speech rights.
But my question was not about it being directly unconstitutional (which I think it is). It was about it being nonsensical in the light of fair use (as the other commenter brought above about forbidding to look to the right before making a turn).
You just said that DMCA is separate from copyright and thus fair use doesn't apply to it conceptually. So DMCA is not related to right to establish exclusive rights to works and etc. And it restricts the free speech. So why is it not unconstitutional? (See https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100402/1856128861.shtml
> If you make a personal backup by circumventing digital access controls, you are not violating copyright but you are violating the DMCA; you are committing a crime.
It looks to me like self contradicting laws then. How are such cases legally resolved i.e. when law A directly contradicts law B? Fair use says it's legal. DMCA says it's illegal. What is correct then?
And fair use is not a "defense". It's a description of lawful legal actions which aren't affected by restrictions granted in limited monopoly of copyright to begin with.