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from the people-are-DMCA-circumvention-devices-too dept.
The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits devices and software that can be used to circumvent digital restrictions, no matter how trivial the restrictions. A new slide deck from the US Department of Homeland Security (warning for PDF) states that the overall number of copyright-, patent-, trademark-related seizures increased by 8% last year. Though much of it was from traditional counterfeit goods, there were some hints at something more problematic regarding interpretation of the rules:
New data released by Homeland Security shows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized significantly more DMCA circumvention devices in 2017. The seizures, which includes mod chips for gaming consoles, increased 324% compared to the year before, although the actual number remains fairly low.
[...] What we did notice is that the International Intellectual Property [sic] Alliance (IIPA) recently framed streaming boxes as possible circumvention tools. The strong enforcement focus of rightsholders on these devices may have been communicated to border patrols as well.
Again, there is no word yet on what the border staff actually consider to be circumvention technologies.
From TorrentFreak : U.S. Border Seizures of DMCA Circumvention Devices Surges
and the Washington Examiner : US customs agencies seize $1.2B in counterfeit imports as illegal goods market continues to grow.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11 2018, @01:25AM (2 children)
All these pedantic comments, this is why nerds fail at politics.
A circumvention technology is whatever they say it is. Stop looking for reason and internal consistence where there is only Kafkaesque bureaucracy. This is how power operates.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday March 11 2018, @02:09PM (1 child)
Yes indeed, easy to focus on the trees and not see the forest. One tree of note is that Bernie Sanders had similar run ins with customs at the Canadian border, when he organized bus rides for seniors to Canada to get inexpensive prescription drugs at a time when the border patrol was seizing drugs, basically working on behalf of Big Pharma and not the American people.
Enforcers, no matter what branch, are prone to jack booted thuggery. The work attracts the kind of personality who aspires to be a brownshirt, loves harassing, inconveniencing, and humiliating their fellow persons. Give them the flimsiest of excuses, and they'll go nuts. If allowed, many would use torture, like at Abu Ghraib. It's a never ending problem to keep a tight leash on those impulses, and to design systems that very carefully limit the authority granted to the officials, so the power doesn't go to their heads and lead to abuse. A major feature of the infamous Stanford prison experiment was a lack of clear rules to limit the power of the people randomly assigned to positions of authority.
The part I wonder about is the extra judicial channel, the private line, that lets special interests dog-whistle in enforcers' ears. I would guess that points directly to senior officials taking not-a-bribe bribes, you know, the cushy industry jobs for their nephews kind of stuff. But how to reform the Border Patrol to vastly reduce if not entirely eliminate that kind of corruption? It's a real tough sell these days to suggest the Border Patrol needs more oversight, not with all this "build a wall" fever that's been stoked. Working the other end, that is, trying to show the industry that they're fools for trying to manipulate and bribe law enforcement and persuade them that they shouldn't do it, looks rather hopeless without the threat of prison to get their attention.
Another target is of course the DMCA itself. Yeah, lots of problems with intellectual property law. The DMCA is merely one piece of the puzzle. I often feel that nothing less than a Constitutional Amendment, to revoke the Copyright Clause, will ultimately resolve matters. And that strikes me as nearly impossible to accomplish. Maybe we can instead return IP law to a semblance of sanity by rolling back the extreme expansions and extensions that have built up, like with the 2014 Alice decision that really put the hurt on the whole idea of patenting software and business methods.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday March 11 2018, @04:48PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_International [wikipedia.org]
Thank you for mentioning this important milestone and droplet of hope after decades of software patent insanity. I somehow missed it when it happened.