I've spent decades obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law in the US: Sec 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that makes it a felony to help others change how their computers work, to serve them rather than the manufacturer.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

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@pluralistic
A genius who can make this stuff understandable to a simpleton like me! Enshittification has really gotten me riled up. I will write longhand and trace pictures before I buy another crappy printer. Don't even get me started on "smart" devices.
I highly recommend The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. I just finished listening.
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Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine - for a first offense. This law *can* refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

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But *software* is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

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Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are *not* copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a *long-ass time* for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

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As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lea

Refrigerators:

pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/dig

Dishwashers:

pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cas

Treadmills:

pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vap

Tractors:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/rep

Cars:

pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edi

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As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

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I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to *use* a circumvention tool. But they *can't* give you the right to *acquire* that tool.

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I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

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The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am *I* allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

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Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to *personally* reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

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Oh, I said. But if a blind person *did* manage this, could they supply the tool to *other* blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally - without help from others - figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

*That* is what is meant by a *use exemption* without a *tools exemption*. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

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The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on.

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Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now *technically* allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there *is* one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that *is* potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

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You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

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