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posted by janrinok on Saturday August 20 2016, @01:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the fight-back-begins dept.

Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently filed a lawsuit challenging Section 1201 of the US's Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which provides legal reinforcement to the technical shackles of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Defective by Design applauds this lawsuit and agrees with the EFF that Section 1201 violates the right to freedom of speech. We hope that excising Section 1201 from US law can be the beginning of the end for DRM.

DRM is regularly cracked, or "circumvented," by skilled technologists. Many of them make tools to automate the process, which, in the hands of the public, can be used to defang DRM on a mass scale. Frustrated by this challenge to their authority, the media lobby and their friends in government created anti-circumvention laws like Section 1201 and others around the world, to make it illegal to circumvent DRM or share tools for circumventing it. Since the 90s, these laws have propped up DRM. Hopefully, when 1201 is gone, circumvention tools will spread more widely and it will be so difficult to restrict users with DRM that companies will just stop trying. To make this a reality of course, others around the world will have to take up the torch from EFF and eliminate anti-circumvention laws that play the role of 1201 in their own countries.

It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security.

Bruce Schneier

Copyright © 2006—2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 license (or later version)Why this license?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @01:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @01:55AM (#390388)

    Submitted by Zak Rogoff on August 17, 2016 - 9:20am