IANAL Fair use usually applies to copying the work or publishing it, or making a dervied work from it (y'know all the thing that the copyright holder usually only has legal rights to do).

Merely transforming the work yourself and keeping it yourself, wouldn't really count as anything that copyright law has any say over. Since it's not explicitly illegal, it's legal. You don't need 'fair use rights' when you tear up a book in frustration, or your kid scribbles on it. Likewise you can copy your file locally and mangle it if you want.

Copyright law only gives the copyright holder some rights to some things. It's not like they own every single copy of the book/film/file completely.

This is why there was a new law in the USA (the DMCA) which explicitly criminalized breaking DRM. They needed a new law for it.

(However you may enter the territory of hacking a computer system (which is broadly "doing something to a computer that the owner doesn't want").

Here's the text of the law.

(http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/VII/crosshe...)

Anti-circumvention is mention in the 'long title'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_...)

England doesn't have fair use, it has fair dealing. Fair dealing is much more restrictive that the US fair use.

Europe implemented a copyright directive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#European_Uni...)

Here's some advice (from a biased source) about fair dealing (http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p27_work_of_othe...) - notice that the only mention of back-up is for computer software. (That's the only mention in the actual act, too.)

Maybe parts of Europe allow circumvention of technical measures for backup, but England isn't one of those parts.

So while it's still legal, it tends to conflict with service most services TOS agreements.

Were I to make "unauthorized backups" of my games, Steam would shut down my account completely, by means of the "we can do what we want for no given reason" clause of the ToS.

I'm not even speculating, I've seem them do this - a guy owned L4D2 and complained to them that he had stability issues with singleplayer and had to play a cracked version while they got around to fix the network code. His entire account was banned for "piracy".

So fair use shmair use, I guess. You can still be punished by service termination and DRM lockouts even if they can't actually prosecute you.

It's fair use in the States, too, when the result is exercise of fair use. The fact that provisions in the DMCA could allow someone to go after a linux user using mplayer to play his DVDs doesn't mean that someone will pursue that case - it would create a serious risk of getting provisions of the law stricken by the courts.