It is now a crime to unlock your smartphone

[Blake]

Is there a phone company out there that refuses to unlock the phone, even if you ask nicely?

[leemajors]

I think they all will provided you're off contract.

[Drachen]

https://pe ions.whitehouse.gov/pet...paign=shorturl

Go sign it

[Winehole23]

But among the DMCA’s many flaws is a significant one of which most people aren’t aware: For more than a decade, the act has imposed a barrier to access for people with disabilities. It hinders access to books, movies, and television shows by making the development, distribution, and use of cutting-edge accessibility technology illegal.

Making creative works accessible often involves transforming content from one medium to another—such as adapting the audio of a television show to closed captions to make it accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Copyright law ordinarily vests authors of creative works with the exclusive right to create adaptations, such as translations to foreign languages. But making works accessible to people with disabilities is arguably exempt from copyright law under the fair use doctrine and other laws like the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act. Congress, federal courts, the U.S. Copyright Office, and even the World Intellectual Property Organization have begun to recognize that it’s bad policy to block efforts to create accessible versions of copyrighted works.




At least, that’s the case with physical and analog media. But publishers, video programmers, and other copyright owners lock down digital content with digital rights management technology designed to limit users’ ability to access, copy, and adapt copyrighted works to specific cir stances. And copyright owners frequently fail to account for the need to adapt DRM-en bered works to make them accessible to people with disabilities. For example, e-books often include DRM technology that prevents people who are blind or visually impaired from running e-books that they have lawfully purchased through a text-to-speech converter that reads the books aloud. Similarly, Internet-distributed video and DVD and Blu-ray discs include DRM features that prevent researchers from developing advanced closed captioning and video description technologies that make movies and television shows accessible. (For example, some Internet-delivered videos don't include closed captions at all, and sub les on DVD and Blu-ray discs can be incomplete, riddled with errors, or so badly formatted that they can't be read.)



Bypassing this DRM technology is often trivial from a technical perspective. But the DMCA makes it illegal—even if the person bypassing DRM is doing so for a noninfringing use like making it accessible to people with disabilities. If you want to get around the DMCA, there is no fair use; instead, you must pe ion the librarian of Congress for a special exemption to cir vent a class of works, such as e-books. The proceeding to consider exemption pe ions, known as the “triennial review,” takes place only once every three years and requires pe ioners to navigate a complex bureaucratic process, satisfy an incredibly high burden of proof, invest months of effort, and overcome opposition from copyright lobbying groups with nearly bottomless resources. It’s no wonder the vast majority of exemption pe ions are denied.



Even if a pe ioner can successfully make a case for an exemption, a separate part of the DMCA still bars her from distributing accessibility technology with cir vention components to people with disabilities. Worse, the exemption will last for only three years, after which it will expire unless the pe ioner successfully renews it. Making the same case over and over again isn’t just a waste of time and resources—it puts at risk any progress toward accessibility achieved under the previously granted exemption, which can be wiped away by the whim of the librarian of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office. (The librarian’s October decision to ban cellphone unlocking after exempting it for nearly six years is a prime example of such a whim.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...le.single.html

[boutons_deux]

I note how the BigMedia industry can put you in prison for decades, fine you $100Ks if your tool just enables others to DL copyrighted media

I note how less BigGun industry if fully shielded for any responsibility if their "tools" are used to commit crimes.

[Winehole23]

Ian Hickson, the googler who is overseeing the HTML5 standard at the W3C, has written a surprisingly frank piece on the role of DRM. As he spells out in detail, the point of DRM isn't to stop illegal copying, it's to stop legal forms of innovation from taking place. He shows that companies that deploy DRM do so in order to prevent individuals, groups and companies from innovating in ways that disrupt their profitability:

The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices.
Content providers have leverage against content distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted content without the permission of the content's creators. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, what would happen is that users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it, letting them do so in whatever manner they wanted.
Here are some examples:
A. Paramount make a movie. A DVD store buys the rights to distribute this movie from Paramount, and sells DVDs. You buy the DVD, and want to play it. Paramount want you to sit through some ads, so they tell the DVD store to put some ads on the DVD labeled as "unskippable".
Without DRM, you take the DVD and stick it into a DVD player that ignores "unskippable" labels, and jump straight to the movie.

This is the first third of my recent Guardian column, What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM, but there's two other important points to make, apropos the W3C:
1. DRM always involves patents with onerous licensing terms that are incompatible with the W3C's patent policy, because patent licensing is the hook by which those disruptive -- but legal -- features can be prohibited
2. DRM can't be implemented in free/open code. For DRM to work, anyone who implements it has to design their implementation to prevent users from changing it. This is reflected in the "robustness" rules that always accompany DRM licensing, which always prohibit "user modifiability."
In other words:
1. DRM's purpose is to prevent legal innovation
2. DRM requires onerous patent licenses
3. DRM is incompatible with free/open code and systems
Discussions about DRM often land on the fundamental problem with DRM: that it doesn't work, or worse, that it is in fact mathematically impossible to make it work. (via /.)

---

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing cir stances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line

http://boingboing.net/2013/03/20/htm...ml#more-219730

[LnGrrrR]

What's crazy about DRM, and the whole "you're only buying a license to use, not actual hardware" is that it's only come about due to the ease of copying. No one really had an issue with it when it was VHS tapes, or cassette tapes, or even CDs. (Of course, there were issues with it in the early Americas, where "authors" would nearly wholesale copy famous works of English authors... but that's another topic.)

Anyways, imagine if we took the whole "license" thing to other purchases? Bought a dress and thinking of modifying it? Only if the license allows you to! Bought a car and want to put in new speakers? Not if the DRM doesn't allow it! Etc etc. It's obviously far-fetched, but I think it works for a thought experiment.

[boutons_deux]

Leaked! MPAA Talking Points On Copyright Reform: Copyright Is Awesome For Everyone!


http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...everyone.shtml


Another case is BigPharma tweaking a drug to extend its patent another 17 or whatever years, with no improvement in drug effectiveness.

Another case is BigPharm's "pay-to-delay" scam where their expired-patent drugs are denied compe ion from generics (1/6 or less the cost) and kept on the market by BigPharma paying a generic mfr not to sell the generic.



BigPharma whines that it must cover the expenses of (fudged, bogus, dishonest, ineffective) drug testing, BUT! :

Pharmaceutical Companies Spent 19 Times More On Self-Promotion Than Basic Research


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1760380.html

[Winehole23]

It's that time again: every three years, the Copyright Office allows the public to ask for exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on "cir vention," which prevents you from unlocking devices you own.

As it usually does, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked for exemptions to be granted: this time around, it's asking for permission to unlock your car's diagnostic software so that you can choose who fixes it; for permission to play abandoned video games that you've bought, but that won't play in emulation (and for which no viable hardware can be readily had); and to renew the jailbreaking exemption that lets you unlock your phone, and to extend that to tablets and other devices; and also to renew the right to jailbreak your DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, and streaming videos to let you take excerpts from them.

http://boingboing.net/2014/11/04/eff...-office-f.html