but it does not protect your right to bypass any digital security mechanism to do this, or to disclose how you did this to anyone else by threat of law.

They lobbied for laws to explicitly prevent this, and given the strict constructionalist nature of the current courts, its unlikely we'll regain or be able to enforce these rights in this capacity without significant intervention by policy makers.

If anyone has Lexis I’d love to know if there’s any caselaw on the intersection of the right to make backups vs the anti-circumvention provisions. One could certainly argue that making a lawful backup isn’t a circumvention.

Not a lawyer, but have been curious about this before. Last I checked, format shifting is legal in Canada. Breaking even the known-broken DVD encryption, however, is illegal. We also appear to still pay a blank media tax. Considering I back up important documents to blank CDs every few months, the Music And Film Induatry of America [0] is still being paid, and so I pirate with a (relatively) clear conscience.

[0] Not the real acronym, but this one allows me to call the media conglomerates the MAFIA for a bit of a giggle