Portugal Pushes Law to Partially Ban DRM, Allow Circumvention
For context, the current government is composed of a center-left party supported by two "far-left" parties, which have the majority despite the center-right party having come out on top in number of votes. The bill comes from one of the far-left parties (Left Block).<p>That said, it's fairly mild: only says one can't use DRM to prevent users from enjoying their legal rights, and there's no penalty, except that the DRM breakers won't get fined by our (EU-mandated) anti-circumvention laws, if I'm reading it correctly. And they haven't revoked the bill passed by the previous right-wing government, which forced ISPs to block access to a bunch of "piracy" related sites (TPB, Kickass, etc).<p>Also, the private copying exception that they mention (and which already existed) doesn't come from free: we have an extra tax on storage devices that gets pooled into a fund to "compensate" authors for that exception.