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DMCA Doesn't Protect Garage Door Remotes
bgood writes "A federal judge in Illinois has ruled that a univeral remote garage door opener does not violate the DMCA. "Consumers have a reasonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law," Judge Rebecca M. Pallmeyer said. "This was an attempt to expand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to where it had never gone before," said Andrea B. Greene, attorney for privately held Skylink, the manufacture of the garage door opener in question. "[This is] very good news for consumers." Additional coverage at Wired and Security Focus."
Stop trolling.
First of all, there are legitimate uses of ball bearings. It's pretty obvious what they're used for. You choose a very poor example to make your point.
Also, there is no monopoly on garage door openers or garage door openers or their remotes. If a company wishes to stop third-party remotes from opening their garage door openers, then that is there right.
Also, there is no interoperability at issue here. That is simply not correct. I think you misunderstand what it means. The classic example of this is Compaq reverse engineering IBM's BIOS for the purpose of allowing software that runs on IBM machines to run on Compaq machines. Interoperability does not apply here, however. The two situations are not similar at all.
Mods, do your job and mod this troll down.
This is one area where I think the object oriented ideals have hurt software.
Prior to OOP, the industry was concentrating on creating data format standards. Programs may change, but the data saved to the disk stays constant. In such a world, there would be standard document format such as SGML, HTML, MP3, GIF, JPEG...Different programs would read and write these formats.
OOP is really about memory management in the processor. However, it holds the ideal that the object owns the data. The ideal that a program "owns" the data encourages the development of proprietary data formats. This is why persistence was such a problem for early OOP implementations. When data is saved to a disk, any program can come in a dink with the data.
Anyway, if you hold to the ideal that an object is the owner of the data, then the question of different programs having access to data store takes on an ideological dimension. The data and code together make the object. Anyone trying to write programs to crack this dependency is violating the primary tenet of the code.