The Right to Repair Your Electronics Just Got Stronger
In 1998, Congress unanimously passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) to implement two international copyright treaties. Among other provisions, the DMCA addresses the use of technical measures (digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. The new provisions impose fines and criminal penalties for:
- circumventing DRM (Sec. 1201(a)(1)(A)), whether or not copyright infringement takes place, and
- manufacturing, importing, or offering to the public, any technology, product, service, device or component for the purpose of circumventing DRM (Sec. 1201(a)(2)).
The DMCA included some limited exceptions that allow circumventing DRM by:
- A nonprofit library, archives, or educational institution to review a work solely to determine whether to acquire a copy of that work (Sec. 1201(d));
- A federal or state employee or contractor performing lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security or intelligence activity (Sec. 1201(e));
- A lawful user of a computer program solely to reverse engineer portions of the program to enable interoperability with other programs that have not previously been readily available to the person doing the reverse engineering (Sec. 1201(f));
- A bona fide encryption researcher using a lawfully-obtained copy to identify and analyze flaws and vulnerabilities of encryption technologies applied to the copyrighted work if the researcher made a good faith effort to obtain authorization before the circumvention (Sec. 1201(g));
- A person performing good-faith security testing of a computer or network with the authorization of the owner or operator of the computer or network (Sec. 1201(j))
Rules Reviewed Every Three Years
The DMCA also included a recognition that the prohibitions on circumventing DRM could get in the way of (otherwise lawful) use of copyrighted works. To address this, the DMCA includes a requirement (Sec. 1201(a)(1)) that the Register of Copyrights review specific types of (otherwise lawful) use that may be impeded by the DMCA and recommend rules (Read more...)
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The State of Security authored by Amy Grant. Read the original post at: https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-awareness/right-repair-electronics-stronger/