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You may have thought that if you owned your digital devices, you were allowed to do whatever you like with them. In truth, even for possessions as personal as your car, PC, or insulin pump, you risked a lawsuit every time you reverse-engineered their software guts to dig up their security vulnerabilities—until now.
Last Friday, a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA's ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue them. One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles. Together, the security community and DIYers are hoping those protections, which were enacted by the Library of Congress's Copyright Office in October of 2015 but delayed a full year, will spark a new era of benevolent hacking for both research and repair.
Unfortunately, the exemptions are only temporary and will need to be re-approved the next time the Copyright Office reviews its exemptions, in 2018.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:39PM
Its gone thru the journalist filter so many times I'm not sure whats actually changing.
I'm pretty sure its this
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/10/28/2015-27212/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control#h-12 [federalregister.gov]
And the wikipedia interpretation of the above at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Anti-circumvention_exemptions [wikipedia.org]
has a list of ten interesting things although the journalists insist it exclusively applies to cars and pacemakers.
If the copyright owner shuts down the server for a multiplayer game or online authenticated game, anything you personally own as long as its for "good faith security research", interoperability, software removal, if you own a device and have authorization to connect to the network you can have your way with the device firmware if you need to, any ebook that interferes with ADA compliance can be ripped, you can rip and sample for the usual fair use reasons video thats encrypted as long as you don't rip the whole thing, shitty 3d printers that try the overpriced ink strategy by microchipping the PLA have zero legal protection now, you can break into a medical device to "steal" your own medical data and that data is now yours (silo busting digital xrays for example). And the cheezy as hell examples of car and pacemaker the journalists are fixated on although they're not as interesting.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @04:33PM
Maybe back in the mid-'00s this would have mattered, but with the current generations of signed firmware, unless the LoC forces companies to release signing keys for discontinued products, this hacking allowance is irrelevant since most of the devices are now tamperproof at the silicon level, and some or all of the software is immutable without having those keys to allow replacement and execution of user-modified images which don't pass the checksums or decryption sequences.
The fact that the government hasn't put more effort into protecting consumer rights really goes to show who is more important in globalized, nevermind american society today. 'Ownership' of hardware means jack when others control the keys to its overall operation.