cageymaru
Fully [H]
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2003
- Messages
- 22,086
The Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office has proposed adding new rules that would make hacking DRM legal if done to repair devices purchased legally. Devices such as smartphones, tractors, cars, computers, and more can have their firmware hacked to facilitate repairs to the devices. Right to repair activists such as Louis Rossmann have been calling for these changes for years. Of course this doesn't mean that consumers can circumvent DRM to access copyrighted works. Page 52 of the Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies delves into software and video game preservation.
While this is a huge win on a federal level, this decision does nothing to address the practicalities of what consumers and independent repair professionals face in the real world. Anti-tampering and repair DRM implemented by manufacturers has gotten increasingly difficult to circumvent, and the decision doesn't make DRM illegal, it just makes it legal for the owner of a device to bypass it for the purposes of repair. "Getting an exemption to reset the device is pretty different from having access to the firmware to actually do that," Proctor said.
While this is a huge win on a federal level, this decision does nothing to address the practicalities of what consumers and independent repair professionals face in the real world. Anti-tampering and repair DRM implemented by manufacturers has gotten increasingly difficult to circumvent, and the decision doesn't make DRM illegal, it just makes it legal for the owner of a device to bypass it for the purposes of repair. "Getting an exemption to reset the device is pretty different from having access to the firmware to actually do that," Proctor said.