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StorageTek Blocks 3rd Party Maintenance with DMCA
bstone writes "According to LawGeek, a district court in Boston has used the DMCA to grant a preliminary injunction against a third party service vendor who tried to fix StorageTek tape library backup systems. The court found that third party service techs who used the 'Maintenance Key' without StorageTek's permission 'circumvented' to gain access to the copyrighted code in violation of the DMCA, even though they had the explicit permission of the purchasers to fix their machines."
If you don't have enough money to buy politicians, you can still stop buying from companies who attack via stupid laws. If you don't have that choice, you have to live with it.
I just found out today that Switzerland passed a law in 2002 forbidding manufacturers' garages from claiming that third-party repairs and service work would void automobile warranties, even though car owners could save up to half in parts and labor costs.
If I were a purchasing executive, and had just blown a large amount of money on an SL8500, I'd seriously reconsider buying from StorageTek in the future if they were going to lock me in to their own service plans with such an ability to set prices without any competition.
Remember kids, vote with your wallets and let them know it...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
...until only the OEM will be allowed to open your box and repair / upgrade / modefy it?
I do hope this ruling is overturned. If it's left standing, it may lead to fewer and fewer computer (and other) related items that could be serviced / upgraded by everyone (and thus cheaper than if only the OEM could do so). If this is allowed to go on, how long will it be before we see the first car which only the OEM could change oil on?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
this case seems to basicly to be about a password protected maintenance system .... wait 'till the car companies start putting passwords on their engine computers and claiming this as a precedent ....
Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing a monopoly status is.
So now, everyone is going to encode their products' internal software so that any attempt to access it in any way to service it can be construed as attempting to circumvent a protection system.
Nice.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Hit um where it hurts!
Open Source Sushi
So there's no chapter in DMCA about
- owner's rights ?
- rights to recover you own data ?
- create interoperability when needed ?
This law is certainly well thought out.
Very well balanced:
Producer has all rights and consumer has none.
- and in exchange for that -
Consumer has no rights and producer has all.
We, up here in the true north, tend to see the American governing bodies as just too damn big and requiring lobbists just to get a prefunctory hearing.
Perhaps one of the more telling differences between Canadian and American systems is the much more proactive stance of the judiciary in the American system. Presently there is some debate in Canada as to how proactive we want our judiciary. I see the American judiciary as being empowered and expected to mititgate against such Catch 22 situations as the one the story outlines. Perhaps it would make an interesting Poll to ask
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
What does this ruling mean? If it stands up on appeal, it means StorageTek has a monopoly on service for all of its machines. No independent vendor will be able to compete with them for service contracts because no independent vendor will be authorized to "access" the maintenance code necessary to debug the machine.
Reading between the lines, it also seems to imply that vendors would in the future have a free card to hold their customers hostage. Imagine if a company built in code to cause a range of various complaints. It would be breaking the DMCA to reverse engineer their code and pinpoint that the problems were built in. At the same time, the company would be able to turn a nice profit on charging for "maintenance" contracts to "fix" the "bugs".
Of course, if there were too many such problems it would damage the reputation of their products. But if there were few enough, it could provide just enough extra "free revenue" to provide a useful extra profit source.
Fun stuff huh?
A little planning goes a long way...
I'm frightened. The way things are regressing, we'll have an Orwellian world with a handful of companies controlling everything; simply because they've locked down everybody with their proprietary technologies. What these greed-stricken politicians and clueless judges don't realize is that they're destroying the very premise of capitalism in the name of protecting a few corporations. What's worrying me even more is that technology is evolving at such a rapid pace that i don't see judges even coming close to keeping abreast with it. we shall definitely see more clueless rulings like this one.
If I were a purchasing executive, and had just blown a large amount of money on an SL8500, I'd seriously reconsider buying from StorageTek in the future if they were going to lock me in to their own service plans with such an ability to set prices without any competition.
;)
Odd, EMC has been locking people into service contracts and putting the screws to them for decades
So does this mean that with my fancy new car...the one with the factory alarm system...that a locksmith would be breaking the DMCA if he helped me without the factory's permission? Seems about the same to me.
Just another day in Paradise
Yes. But if you reverse-engineer the specs, you can open up a BMW-servicing shop. Under the DMCA, if they encode any bit of the info, you could be sued. That's the issue here: Not that the company has to help you figure out what to do; it's that you're not allowed to discover it on your own.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Perpetual state of war, government controlling the flow of the "free press," re-writing the language (e.g. patriot act), government can review your reading habits without a warrant, there are cameras at every major intersection, cameras located on every isle of meijer, government can listen to your phone conversations with little oversight,,, Did you know you need a permit to protest in public?
At what point do you step back and say... OK, now is it orwellian?
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
What quailifies as circumvention these days?
Holding down the "shift" key.
Sad, isn't it?
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Or better, they are trying to monopolize the said market.
The goal of every capitalist is to dominate the market. The lesson here is that our laws and court system are so incredibly broken to allow trivial monopolies to occur without some sort of corresponding public good to outweigh the inefficiencies that come with monopolies. Patents and copyrights are monopolies. That they can be handed out like candy, and retained almost indefinitely (in the case of copyrights), or for obvious or pre-existing inventions, clearly undermines any possible public benefit to granting such a monopoly.
The real tragedy is that YOUR money (in the form of tax dollars) will inevitably go toward enforcing such monopolies under the current law, in the form of court time, paperwork, and legal actions (both civil and criminal if certain lawmakers have their way). Yes, you got that right - you're paying money so that the government can sue you on behalf of monopolists who are ripping you off (in most cases.) That you've already paid for your congresscritters to pass such stupid legislation, and will eventually pay again for the court time and challenges required to overturn such legislation should also be factored into the equation.
Copyrights and patents were meant to reward sharing material and ideas reduced to practice with the public, by protecting your ability to profit from that information even after making the info public. In many cases, I'd argue copyrights really don't apply because there are so many restrictions (ie, copy protection in the form of DRM, shrinkwrap agreements, etc), you're really dealing with something more akin to trade secrets rather than copyright. In the same vein, the companies aren't really sharing the information with the public in exchange for monopoly protection. For example, a publisher issues a DVD which degrades in 5 years, but forbids anyone from making any copies, which means that 20 years down the line, there are no readable copies left. Sounds crazy? Many old films fall into this sort of trap - the only surviving copies exist because somebody violated the "law" by hanging onto something they weren't supposed to, or by making a bootleg duplicate. The irony? Studios doing restorations of films to release onto DVD have relied on such copies (because they didn't take care of their own masters), which have surfaced from time to time, from certain "private" collections.
Theoretically it is supposed to be that every copyrighted work is filed with the Library of Congress, but since they're not getting enough money to store, cateogorize, and preserve such materials, they've long since dropped that requirement. So much for preserving creative works until such time that they lapse into the public domain...
...he would be held liable if he didn't fix it, and the manufacturer is protected from all liability for defective heart stimulators anyway.
so everyone loses except the manufacturer.
I still can't get over how phrases like "Free Speech Zone" and "The Homeland" have entered the language with such little fanfare. Anyone refering to the protection of The Homeland and wearing a little lapel flag 24/7 would have been looked at a little funny in Ye Olden Dayes.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Which of these is true:
- Your population is underinformed, living in fear and being exploited by corporations
- Everything is hunky-dory, just these troublesome terrorists to deal with (but not the causes, obviously) and they only hate us because we're free or something.
Really, something is wrong with America. The diminishing of personal "liberties" (why didn't you say rights?) you're happy to tolerate is just one symptom, and without treatment of the causal disease (and I'm not pretending to know what it is) there's only one inevitability; the death of America. At best, I think you're looking at civil war within 30 years. Insane? Maybe, but did you argue when Reagan funded the Mujaheddin?The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Except:
1) They sold you the device. What right do thay have to prevent you from modifying your own property to take advantage of capabilities they built into it then proceeded to disable? This is like Intel suing someone for overclocking a processor!
2) Good for StorageTek. If they want to cut their margins in anticipation of future business, that's their problem.
3) If they don't want people to be examining it, they should lock it away in a secure room. Trade secrets have no legal protection as long as they're not leaked in violation of contract - so if I get a StorageTek device and reverse-engineer the trade secrets out... They can't do anything. If they want legal protection and truly have an innovative invention, they can do what everyone else does: patent it.