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EFF Is Suing the US Government To Invalidate the DMCA's DRM Provisions (boingboing.net)
Cory Doctorow, writes for BoingBoing: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just filed a lawsuit that challenges the Constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA, the "Digital Rights Management" provision of the law, a notoriously overbroad law that bans activities that bypass or weaken copyright access-control systems, including reconfiguring software-enabled devices (making sure your IoT light-socket will accept third-party lightbulbs; tapping into diagnostic info in your car or tractor to allow an independent party to repair it) and reporting security vulnerabilities in these devices. EFF is representing two clients in its lawsuit: Andrew "bunnie" Huang, a legendary hardware hacker whose NeTV product lets users put overlays on DRM-restricted digital video signals; and Matthew Green, a heavyweight security researcher at Johns Hopkins who has an NSF grant to investigate medical record systems and whose research plans encompass the security of industrial firewalls and finance-industry "black boxes" used to manage the cryptographic security of billions of financial transactions every day. Both clients reflect the deep constitutional flaws in the DMCA, and both have standing to sue the US government to challenge DMCA 1201 because of its serious criminal provisions (5 years in prison and a $500K fine for a first offense).Doctorow has explained aspects of this for The Guardian today. You should also check Huang's blog post on this.
You might want to put a link to EFF's donate page. Thanks.
Since you didn't bother reading the article, I will give you the relevant part. Their complaint "builds on two recent Supreme Court precedents (Golan and Eldred), in which the Supremes stated that the only way to reconcile free speech with copyright's ability to restrict who may utter certain words and expressions is fair use and other exemptions to copyright, which means that laws that don't take fair use into account fail to pass constitutional muster."
I wish them well with this and I'm going to give them money, but money of course is a huge problem now. This is a government and a court that finds things Constitutional or not based on what corporations want, and corporations and law enforcement want broad, hard to interpret laws that can be used to put little people in jail for the 'crime' of bothering the powerful. The DMCA is a terrible law that has been abused more than used, just like how the allegedly anti terrorism Patriot Act is mostly used to prosecute petty drug crimes, quell dissent and anti corporate behavior and other things nobody wants to give up a shred of freedom over.
I don't recall copyright having an amendment. Don't Constitutional rights trump pretty much everything else, period?
Copyright is one of the enumerated powers of Congress (U.S. Const. I.8): "The Congress shall have power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This power is subject to other rights retained by the people, such as freedom from Congressional interference with freedom of speech (U.S. Const. Amendment I).