Consumer advocates and some legal scholars in Europe have been concerned that the anticircumvention provision of the EUCD conflicts with private copying rights in the copyright laws of most European countries.  (This is analogous to concerns in the US that DMCA 1201 curtails consumers' Fair Use rights under American law.)  Under the EUCD provision, circumventing DRM in order to make copies of content for one's own use is just as illegal as doing so for infringing purposes.  At the same time, a court in France has found that the copy protection in DVDs abridges private copying rights.

Finland is attempting to resolve this conflict by asking content owners not to sue individuals for hacking DRM systems for purposes of lawful private copying, and it has said that it will not prosecute such circumventions.  It all comes down to benefit of doubt, to which copyright owners say their are entitled because the content is their property; and they fear that copies made under private copying law could lead to more copies that end up on file-sharing networks or otherwise infringe copyright.

Most everyone agrees that there is no such thing as hack-proof DRM.  Despite that, most content owners measure the value of DRM in terms of its robustness.  While that's an important criterion, we believe that it's just as important to measure DRM technologies in terms of the width of the regions of ambiguity between the restrictions they place on content usage and the rights that consumers expect -- that is, the number of use cases where the technology creates a "doubt" to which consumers or content owners can get the benefit.  The gap will never be 100 percent closed, but as long as it narrows, we can claim progress.

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