Yesterday’s Copyright Office ruling
on when you are allowed to break DRM went further than any such ruling
in the DMCA’s 20-year history, and that’s swell, but when you drill into
the ruling, it’s still a flaming pile of garbage.
Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act bans breaking DRM,
even for lawful purposes: repairing your car, say, or installing
third-party apps on a phone, or using third-party ink in your printer.
Back when the DMCA was passed in 1998, everyone warned Congress that
this was an invitation to abusive behavior, but Congress decided the
best way to address this would be to tell the Copyright Office to hold
hearings every three years in which the public could ask for temporary,
limited exceptions to this rule (very limited exceptions: the
Copyright Office can grant you the right to bypass DRM to do something
legit, but can’t give anyone the right to make a tool to exercise that
right: you’re expected to hand-whittle your own Iphone or car
jailbreaking gadget, with no help from anyone else).
The Copyright Office likes to make these exceptions ridiculously narrow, with so many terms and conditions that you have to hire a lawyer just to figure out if they apply to you.
This year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation applied for a slate of
exceptions designed to get the lawyers out of the picture, making them
wide and clear enough that Americans could read the rules, figure them
out, and apply them.
And while the Copyright Office granted some really great exceptions for
repair, preservation, security research, and more – but larded these
exceptions with so much copyrightese that the average person is going to
struggle to figure out what they really permit.
EFF is suing the US government to kill Section 1201 of the DMCA altogether. It was a terrible idea in 1998 and it’s only gotten worse every day since.
