[Fyron]

"Fyron, my calm down posts were in direct response to your overblowing of my statements - and I stand by them. I know there was no flaming, but the sarcastic remarks aren't helpful discussion either."

Illustrating how your more extreme proposals would negatively affect many things unrelated to piracy was certainly not "overblowing" anything. Any proposal must be examined to the fullest extent before implementation can be considered. I wasn't generally trying to be sarcastic, just extrapolating on the results.

And besides, as someone else said already, there is no way you can possibly prove that the purpose of a piece of software designed to duplicate CDs or whatever was piracy. There may be the occasional item specifically labeled "Pirate CD Ripper" or something, but that is by far the exception, not the rule. How do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were making it for piracy purposes and not so that people could exercise their legal or reasonable fair use rights? There is no "common sense" test that could be applied in a court of law here that I can think of.

"Furthermore, you say that laws prohibiting the number of backups you can make is unrealistic..."

It's not even relevant why someone would want to make 10 backups. There is no need to have an arbitrary limit on the amount of backups you can make. If I wanted to make 10 backup copies of SE4 out of paranoia, does that really make me a criminal? Why does there need to be a legal limitation? Its already illegal to give even a single "backup" copy to someone else.

"...I get the distinct impression that some of you actually think this is a piece of legislation ?!"

I didn't see anyone treating them as legislation currently on the table?