What makes the dmca controversial

But bogus takedown notices aren't the only problem. Companies have also tried to use the DMCA as an anti-hacking law to sue for unauthorized computer access.

Companies have also used the DMCA to keep vehicle owners beholden to authorized dealers for service and repairs. The John Deere company, for example, has refused to unlock its proprietary tractor software to let farm owners repair their own vehicles, leaving tractor owners in fear of DMCA lawsuits if they try to crack the software protections themselves.

DMCA restrictions like this, however, don't just make customers beholden to companies, they can also help hide wrongdoing. Last year, university researchers uncovered something fishy going on with Volkswagen emissions but couldn't determine what exactly was causing it. Eventually, regulators learned that Volkswagen had embedded secret code in its software to help its vehicles cheat emissions tests.

Critics pointed out that had these researchers or others had the freedom to explore Volkswagen's software without the threat of a DMCA violation, the chat code might have been uncovered sooner. The issue with Volkswagen points to a core problem with the DMCA and its stifling of legitimate research. The security community and the software industry has long been at odds over companies threatening legal action under the DMCA to prevent researchers from publicly disclosing software vulnerabilities found in their programs, particularly when those flaws are in the copy-protection mechanisms the companies craft.

The encryption prevented customers from making copies of their books to read on multiple systems, so Sklyarov produced a tool that bypassed this restriction and handed out a trial version at the conference with information about how to purchase the full tool.

Adobe urged the FBI to act but had to withdraw its complaint after the security community rose up in protest. That same year the Secure Digital Music Initiative SDMI , a consortium of recording companies, consumer electronics firms and others, went after a group of researchers who discovered flaws in a digital watermarking technology the consortium developed to thwart piracy.

The SDMI had actually invited hackers and researchers to try to defeat its technology, and a group of researchers led by Princeton University computer science professor Ed Felten succeeded in uncovering flaws. ALA carefully monitors all of these legislative activities. Skip to main content. Among its many provision, the Act: imposes rules prohibiting the circumvention of technological protection measures sets limitations on copyright infringement liability for online service providers OSPs expands an existing exemption for making copies of computer programs provides a significant updating of the rules and procedures regarding archival preservation mandates a study of distance education activities in networked environments mandates a study of the effects of anti-circumvention protection rules on the "first sale" doctrine DMCA and Libraries The following summarizes the key sections of the DMCA that relate to libraries.

The Copyright Office issued its report on Section in August Copyright Office to consult with the appropriate parties and to make recommendations to Congress on how to promote distance education through digital technologies The Copyright Office issued its report , Copyright and Digital Distance Education, in May The DMCA delayed the effective date of the anti-circumvention provision Section until October 23, to allow time for the Librarian of Congress to issue rules that would allow certain users to access certain "classes of works" if they needed to circumvent in order to make "non-infringing use" of the works.

StorageTek sells data storage hardware to large enterprise clients. It also sells maintenance services for its products. Custom Hardware is an independent business that repairs StorageTek hardware. In an effort to eliminate this competitor in the maintenance services market, StorageTek sued under the DMCA, arguing that Custom Hardware had circumvented certain passwords designed to block independent service providers from using maintenance software included in the StorageTek hardware systems.

In other words, StorageTek was using the DMCA to ensure that its customers had only one place to turn for repair services. A district court granted a preliminary injunction against Custom Hardware.

More than a year later, a court of appeals vacated the injunction, holding that where there is no nexus with copyright infringement, there can be no DMCA claim. Although this was a victory for competition, it illustrates the ways in which the DMCA continues to be used to impede competition, rather than prevent piracy. Lexmark, the second-largest laser printer maker in the U. Lexmark had added authentication routines between its printers and cartridges explicitly to hinder aftermarket toner vendors.

SCC ultimately succeeded in getting the injunction overturned on appeal, but only after 19 months of expensive litigation while its product was held off the market. The litigation sent a chilling message to those in the secondary market for Lexmark cartridges.

Skylink ultimately defeated Chamberlain both at the district court and court of appeals, but only after many months of expensive litigation. Datel, Inc. It is difficult to imagine a clearer case of the DMCA being used to stifle competition than was the case here. Microsoft forced consumers to purchase its own memory cards and then used the DMCA to attack legitimate competitors. In both cases, Sony claimed that competitors had violated the DMCA by engaging in unlawful circumvention, even though courts have recognized that the development of interoperable software is a fair use under copyright law.

Because courts have suggested that the DMCA trumps fair use, however, the DMCA has become a new legal weapon with which to threaten those who rely on reverse engineering to create competing products. Neither Connectix nor Bleem were able to bear the high costs of litigation against Sony and eventually pulled their products off the market. Developing these new routines for the Sony Aibo required reverse engineering the encryption surrounding the software that manipulates the robot.

The hobbyist revealed neither the decrypted Sony software nor the code he used to defeat the encryption, but he freely distributed his new custom programs. Sony claimed that the act of circumventing the encryption surrounding the software in the Aibo violated the DMCA and demanded that the hobbyist remove his programs from his website. Nevertheless, Sony discontinued the Aibo robot in Sony complains that mod chips can also be used to play pirated copies of games.

Sony sued Gamemasters, distributor of the Game Enhancer peripheral device, which allowed owners of a U. PlayStation console to play games purchased in Japan and other countries. In Stevens v Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment , the High Court of Australia held in that the regional access coding on Sony PlayStation computer games as implemented by the PlayStation console did not qualify for legal protection, as it did not prevent or inhibit copyright infringement. Sony, like all vendors, is free to attempt to segregate geographic markets.

If it does so, however, it should have to bear its own costs for the effort, rather than relying on the DMCA, which Congress plainly did not enact to trump the usual legal regimes governing parallel importation. Although little information about the case has emerged, in the U. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio indicted 10 people in connection with the case.

The bnetd software was freely distributed, open source, and noncommercial. Blizzard filed suit in St. According to Blizzard, the bnetd software could be used to permit networked play of pirated Blizzard games. The developers never used the software for that purpose, nor was that the purpose for which the software was designed. Nevertheless, Blizzard prevailed on its DMCA claim, and the bnetd developers ceased distributing the software.

OWC obliged. Rather than prevent copyright infringement, the DMCA empowered Apple to force consumers to buy new Mac computers instead of simply upgrading their older machines with an external DVD recorder.

This noise is not displayed on a television set, but it does degrade the recording made by most analog VCRs. ACP does not prevent digital copies. This unfortunate result indicates that the DMCA can be manipulated to push obsolete analog copy protection systems onto new technology innovators. Blizzard, makers the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft WoW , sued MDY Industries, the developer of a program which enables WoW characters to continue playing even when the user is away from her computer.

In March , car product design company XPEL Technologies filed suit against American Filter Film Distributors, a rival who provides services for car paint and window film protection. The court rejected a motion to dismiss the DMCA claim, and the parties subsequently settled the case in October State and federal statutes already protect computer network owners from unauthorized intrusions.

These statutes, however, generally require that a plaintiff prove that the intrusion caused some harm in order to bring a civil suit. The DMCA, in contrast, contains no financial damage threshold, tempting some to use it in place of the statutes that were designed to address computer intrusion. Some courts have taken steps to rein in this particular misuse of the DMCA, ruling that the use of authentic usernames and passwords to access computers cannot constitute circumvention, even if done without the authorization of the computer owner.

Pearl Investments had employed the programmer to create a software module for its software system. Pearl claimed that it had withdrawn the authorization it had previously given to the contractor to access its system through the password-protected VPN and that the VPN connection was therefore unauthorized. Even though the second server was not being used by the programmer at the time, and its hard drive had been accidentally wiped, the court agreed with Pearl that the existence of the VPN was a prohibited circumvention of a technological protection measure that controlled access to a system which contained copyrighted software.

The website run by RMG Technologies provided tickets to events that were likely to sell out quickly on Ticketmaster.

RMG allegedly used software to quickly make bulk purchases of tickets from Ticketmaster, circumventing the limit of four tickets per customer, in order to re-sell the tickets for profit. On a motion for preliminary injunction, the court found that Ticketmaster was likely to succeed on its DMCA, Copyright Act, and breach of contract claims; however, Ticketmaster would not have been able to prevail on the CFAA claim.

The DMCA was not intended for this purpose. The DMCA was designed to protect copyrighted works, not ticket vendors. Although the defense made both these arguments, [] the court nevertheless ruled in favor of Ticketmaster on the DMCA claim. In addition to computer intrusion statues, the DMCA may also be starting to shoulder aside penal statues in other industry areas.

In August , cable provider CoxCom Inc. These low-frequency digital filters blocked pay-per-view charges from being sent to cable companies, thus giving users free pay-per-view. Not surprisingly, the court granted summary judgment against the Chaffees for violation of the Cable Communications Policy Act, a statute specifically enacted to address theft of cable services to protect the economic viability of cable operators and cable programmers.

H, H Aug. Wilson Oct. Wilson to Mark E. RIAA, et al. N2H2 Inc. Times, Sept. Reimerdes, F. Universal City Studios v. Corley, F. Daily J. Times, Nov. Tritton Technologies Inc. Also radioactively illegal to distribute. Green, meanwhile, wants to do security research of the sort that could raise section threats. He has a grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the security of medical record systems. He wants to investigate the security of medical devices; toll collection systems; industrial firewalls and virtual private network devices; and wireless communications systems that connect vehicles to one another and to the surrounding infrastructure.

Critically, the supreme court has given guidance on this question in two rulings, Eldred and Golan, explaining how copyright law itself is constitutional even though it places limits on free speech; copyright is, after all, a law that specifies who may utter certain combinations of words and other expressive material. If these uses had been approved, people such as Huang and Green would not face criminal jeopardy.

But that very complexity — honestly, that very boringness — has allowed this anti-circumvention rule from the DMCA to fester and metastasize into devices that are taking over the physical world.