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Opinion
Smashing the Shackles of Intentionally Dysfunctional Technology
11/29/2006
Yeah, it can get pretty complicated and weird inside copyright law. But this is, basically, good news. Essentially, the exemptions granted by the Library of Congress this time around – more exemptions than ever before at one time – are all against the weirdnesses that companies can get into when they use technology to constrain users in ways that thwart the functionality of the technology that is what customers purchase items for in the first place.
Another example of that is the technique cell phone carrier use to make the phones their customers utilize unusable with competing carriers. I’ve always wondered how they could get away with that. Why didn’t consumers rebel, since it is pretty obvious that the only reason a cell phone won’t work with just anyone’s phone service is because the company you bought it from stuck something in it to reduce its functionality. And this relies on the fact that “fixing” the phone so that it works better is basically illegal. Hmm. Here’s what the new ruling says about this:
5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.
There’s quite a bit of cognitive dissonance around creating a wonderful communications tool and then putting blocks, locks, and knots in the way of maximizing what the customer can do with it. Now presumably, I could use my Sprint Treo 650 with a Nextel service plan. Oh, wait, I probably already could, because Sprint bought Nextel. So…now I could, if I wanted to, use my Sprint Treo 650 with a T-Mobile plan. The sound you hear is the smashing of technologically-induced shackles.
The industry user group that had argued against the exemption, CTIA –The Wireless Association, had argued that film professors could make snippets from unprotected videotape and other media, but professors argued that the highest quality was available only on DVD, and they won. And the Librarian of Congress agreed: “The record did not reveal any alternative means to meet the pedagogical needs of the professors.”
All in all, though, I gotta’ hand it to Librarian of Congress, James H. Billinton. He blasted through some artificialities and recognized some technical realities. Some of those would be, you think, obvious, but not when someone can make money by making it hard for you to play with your toys. Another part of the ruling that has implications not so clear:
2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
So, let’s think about this: I wonder if it’s okay, yet, to make VHS copies of movies on Beta tapes?
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