Re:Opening this article voids warranty
by quantified on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @04:33PM
(#29167778)
For a very unusual definition of “we” that is ordinarily spelt “they”.
Re:Opening this article voids warranty
by drusepth on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @07:00PM
(#29169238)
In general, anyone who has the right to vote can and should be included in the royal "we" of law.
Re:Opening this article voids warranty
by quantified on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @07:14PM
(#29169395)
Congresscritters voted. They are most definitely not “we”.
Re:Opening this article voids warranty
by kmeisthax on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @11:04AM
(#29176227)
This situation is more complicated than just "Congress imposes copyright law upon the public", though. Generally speaking, the people at large have consistently failed to demonstrate any kind of consensus opinion about copyright law, much less a democratic mandate that would clearly indicate to Congress what to do. But they do care very deeply about ensuring the economy continues to grow, especially with somewhat unfair international competition... and the easiest way to do that is to continue to push copyright maximalism.
Yes, individual Americans will get harmed by, say, anticircumvention law, copyright trolling operations, or automated content ID systems. But nobody gets outraged about that in large enough numbers. They do get outraged, however, when they hear about "China stealing our valuable intellectual property" or somesuch. So the message Congress ultimately hears is, "More please!"
Re:Opening this article voids warranty
by quantified on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @01:15PM
(#29178125)
And then they realized that their concerns were misdirected, that as much as they were concerned about “China” they were not concerned about their adversaries at home, like the people who make the stuff they use.
1. You can't legally break such code, unless it's for a handful of statutorily or administratively selected purposes
2. You can't legally tell people how to break such code for any purpose
This provision is part of the DMCA, section 1201. It was policy-laundered through the WTO into US law against the objection of the tech community, so basically every country has the same rules.
The problem with this law is that it's scope dramatically extends past it's intent - hell, half the original law is just exceptions intended to control the extremely broad scope of "no breaking digital locks". What people realized was that they could put DRM on anything, regardless of if copyright actually protected it or not, and it would still have the same effect because DMCA 1201 has horrific chilling effects. Even if SCOTUS says you can't use DMCA 1201 to protect, say, printer cartridge DRM; that decision still took 10 years and millions of dollars in legal fees to reach. No company wants to spend that amount of time and money just to gain access to repair aftermarkets.
On the other hand, the law regarding price gouging is very old and well-established; because it's a very long-running problem. Serial-locked parts were basically unheard of outside of videogame consoles up until this decade. The assumption with DMCA 1201 was that it was going to keep people from copying DVDs, not from repairing tractors. It's one of the few cases in which the law actually needs to catch up to technology (as opposed to someone trying to get away with something and parroting a thought-terminating cliche).