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: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday November 03 2016, @11:39PM
The text of the exemption for vehicles reads as follows:
The other exemption delay is related to "good faith" security research to discover security flaws:
The above is from http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2015/80fr65944.pdf. [copyright.gov]
All the rest of the exemptions have been in effect since 1/28/2015.
Better yet, read the above document yourself and draw your own conclusions.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr