A couple of weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about the deeply unsatisfactory process for obtaining exemptions to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ban on the circumvention of copyright protection measures. As the post explained, meaningful and useful exemptions are blocked by the copyright industry as a matter of course, and only the tiniest and most trivial ones are graciously permitted.
But that’s not the end of the problems with this kind of legislation, as a recent development in Canada underlines. Like the US and the EU, Canada passed legislation designed to prevent the circumvention of copyright protection systems, the so-called “technological protection measures” (TPMs, also known as Digital Rights Management or DRM). Over a decade later, a pair of new Canadian laws allow people to bypass those TPMs in certain circumstances, explained here by iFixit:
Bill C-244 allows consumers to bypass these digital locks for “repair, maintenance, and diagnosis” of their devices. Essentially, if your device is broken, you can work around TPMs to fix it. Meanwhile, C-294 focuses on “interoperability,” meaning you can circumvent locks if needed to get different devices to work together. For example, Canadian farmers can install third-party parts on their equipment without fear of triggering a software lock that keeps them dependent on costly repairs from the manufacturer.
On the face of it, that’s good news. But it’s not quite as good as it might seem, for reasons iFixit points out:
There’s one major limitation that Canada shares with the US: neither country allows for the trafficking of repair tools. While Canadians can now legally bypass TPMs to fix their own devices, they can’t legally sell or share tools designed for that purpose. This means Canadian consumers and repair pros still face technical and legal hurdles to access the necessary repair tools, much like in the US.
What this means in practice is that to take advantage of the new exemptions, people must write their own software repair tools. That limits the benefits to expert professionals and hackers – hardly a huge class. Despite the new laws, there is still no meaningful right in Canada to repair things that you own if they contain software protected by even the flimsiest of digital locks.
That’s truly absurd. Today, even the most trivial devices routinely include software, so the net result of TPM laws is that we have less control over the things we have bought. This is a consequence of the overly-strong protection afforded to all copyright material, which happens to include software. That was brought in at the insistence of the publishers, music companies, and others, with no concern for the long-term collateral damage it would cause. The continuing impossibility for most people to repair the things they own is yet another example of how the mismatch between copyright laws and the digital world is actively diminishing the quality of everyday life.
Featured image by Stable Diffusion.
