Cell Phone owners allowed to break software locks

The library of congress approved many copyright exemptions today. Among the exemptions were new rules about cell phones, DVDs, and electronic books.”

According to an article reported in Yahoo News, Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday. Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books.

All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. The new rules will take effect Monday, November 27, 2006 and expire in three years. In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren’t able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones’ underlying programs.

These exemptions are nice and all, and I know the Library of Congress does not have the authority to do more (only Congress itself or the SoC can repeal the DMCA) – but I feel I’m got punched in the face and the LoC is passing by and helpfully giving me a tooth back. What about all the other missing teeth?

But of course, any system which checks the validity of DRM licenses would be attacked as an invasion of “privacy.”

If you have to validate the licence by contacting a remote server, not only is it an invasion of privacy, but if the remote server is inaccessible you lose the ability to use the content that you have licenced. So if the licensor goes out of business, you have ultimately lost access to everything you have paid for. I’ve brought up this comment with regards to DRM schemes like iTMS before, and invariably I get a comment like “There’s no way a big company like Apple would go under” – what a naive claim. Big companies go under all the time, you only have to look at Enron for a recent example.

For me, this is the big deal – if my entire music library that I have *paid* for suddenly stops working, I’m going to be pretty pissed off.

Also, the ability to use DRM’d content *now* is a big deal. If I have paid for some content, why must I also be required to pay a licence fee to the owner of the DRM technology? This is usually going to either tie me to specific hardware (e.g. I’d have to buy a commercial BluRay player and HDCP capable TV), cost me an infeasable amount of money (wanna try asking Microsoft for a licence to decode WMP’s DRM in your personal project?) or tie me to a specific operating system (why should I be required to buy Windows – an operating system that is completely useless to me – and a new computer to run it on, just so I can play some Microsoft DRM protected content? Seems rather anticompetetive to me – what we effectively have is a cartel of corporations who are doing their level best to lock anyone else out of the market.

Here is a real world example: I use MythTV as my PVR with a DVB-S card. I cannot use this system to pick up much of the satellite programming here in the UK because it is broadcast using NDS-Videoguard encryption. The *only* way you can use such broadcasts with a PVR (without going through the analogue hole) is to buy Sky’s own Sky+ PVR system. Sounds anticompetetive doesn’t it? Sky have a monopoly on satellite enabled PVRs in the UK because noone else can legally produce a PVR system that can receive many of the satellite channels. This doesn’t just apply to Sky’s own channels either – many channels that are touted as “free” are still encrypted using this system and you still have to buy Sky licenced equipment to receive these channels. (And before anyone suggests that Sky own the satellite, they don’t – SES own the Astra 2 constellation.)

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