From the EFF press release:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the U.S. government today on behalf of technology creators and researchers to overturn onerous provisions of copyright law that violate the First Amendment.
...
Ostensibly enacted to fight music and movie piracy, Section 1201 has long served to restrict people's ability to access, use, and even speak out about copyrighted materials—including the software that is increasingly embedded in everyday things. The law imposes a legal cloud over our rights to tinker with or repair the devices we own, to convert videos so that they can play on multiple platforms, remix a video, or conduct independent security research that would reveal dangerous security flaws in our computers, cars, and medical devices. It criminalizes the creation of tools to let people access and use those materials.Copyright law is supposed to exist in harmony with the First Amendment. But the prospect of costly legal battles or criminal prosecution stymies creators, academics, inventors, and researchers. In the complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., EFF argues that this violates their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
Section 1201 of the US Copyright act restricts the Circumvention of Technological Measures: more commonly known as Digital Restrictions Management.
I have always hated how DRM allows copyright holders to restrict what I do with my personal property: while being backed by the force of law.
(Score: 4, Informative) by McD on Friday July 22 2016, @05:26PM
EFF is headlining the case, but the guy they're representing is in the Nerd Pantheon: Bunnie Huang [bunniestudios.com].
Bunnie Huang hacked the original Xbox. He wrote a book about how to do it, which serves as a great primer on hardware hacking. He later gave the book away, [nostarch.com] as a PDF, in memory of Aaron Swartz.
He's co-creator of the crowdsourced Novena [wikipedia.org] laptop, fully open source hardware and software, which has been discussed here before.
Bunnie Huang is a genuine hero for all those who like to tinker with stuff. I fervently hope this effort succeeds, this is the most promising push back to date against the forces that want to control what we do with our stuff.