The DMCA and Circumvention

In 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law, he both created and destroyed critical features of the internet. The Act’s safe-harbor provisions enabled social media, blogs, and other crowd-sourced websites to flourish. At the same time, news outlets and internet advocates including Slate, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Wired, and The New York Times claim that the law’s anti-circumvention statutes have done serious harm to the open flow of information, ideas, and creativity the internet originally stood to offer. In particular, the DMCA has this to say about circumvention: “no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [a given] title.” (per Wired) In English, this means that no individual hacker, company, or consumer may attempt to break into protected media for (almost) any reason. This provision was originally installed to protect DVDs from being copied into bootleg versions. Many people take umbrage with the statute, for varying reasons. The Atlantic argues that the law “threatens to make archivists criminals if they try to preserve our society’s artifacts for future generations” while the EFF rightly points out that the law makes it “legally risky” to engage in reverse engineering of copyrighted software.

The computer science field, both academic and industrial, finds it particularly difficult to come to grips with the dubious nature of reverse engineering. Except for purposes of determining interoperability, (even that can be questionable) reverse engineering is made illegal by the DMCA. Furthermore, the law has enabled companies to place digital locks on their code, preventing external tampering. In my opinion, the concept of software licenses and DRM schemes is absurd. If developers and filmmakers expect their code and films to be treated by the judicial system in the same manner as books or physical artwork, they provide to the public said code and films in the same manner. Books do not contain DRM software, nor are they only procurable under a license and “terms of service” agreement. Paintings do not require signature of a legal document just to complete the purchase transaction. Yet, paintings and books still receive copyright protection under the law. Developers and filmmakers must cease using DRM software and forcing customers into strange legal covenants just to acquire the software or other piece of media. Honestly, DRM is just companies being lazy and unwilling to face the open market. When someone purchases a book, he or she also purchases the rights to do whatever he or she wants with that specific copy: highlight in it, rip pages, read it to a child, or even burn it. The only thing a person cannot do is reprint the book and sell it as their own. Similar practices should apply to software and movies. However, in this case, the rights which should come with purchase would include reverse-engineering if not being done directly for profit and translation into new formats (i.e. burning mixtapes from iTunes purchases). Generally, software and media producers should not be allowed to remove the free nature of both people and markets.

In the same spirit, it should be considered ethical for people to build workarounds for DRM software, so long as they have no profiteering or malicious intent in doing so. If software and other digital media were to be sold in truly discrete, license-free forms, the ethics of reverse engineering, DRM circumvention, and phone unlocking would become clear: let the property owner do with his or her property as he or she pleases. Until these ethical questions can truly be resolved, however, property and copyright laws pertaining to digital media must be completely rewritten and creators of said media must be forced to face competition.