BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Mozilla, YCombinator, Reddit And Others Back Effort To Repeal The DMCA's Anti-Tampering Law

This article is more than 10 years old.

Some of the Internet's biggest rabble rousers are putting their political weight behind a new technological cause: Your right to hack your own gadgets.

On Wednesday a group including Mozilla, startup incubator YCombinator, Reddit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet activism group Fight For the Future and others launched a new campaign they're calling Fix The DMCA. The group's goal: To repeal a provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act known as section 1201 that prevents users and companies from tampering with any device in a way that could be interpreted as circumventing restrictions designed to prevent copyright violations.

The idea for the new campaign began with Sina Khanifar, a 27-year-old entrepreneur and activist who in January launched a petition on Whitehouse.gov to allow the "unlocking" of cell phones. That practice of altering phones' software to allow them to be used on a different carrier became illegal under the DMCA's 1201 provision when an exemption for unlocking phones expired on January 26th. Khanifar's petition quickly amassed more than 114,000 signatures and elicited a friendly response from the White House, who agreed that legal phone unlocking is in the best interests of consumers.

Despite the Obama administration's support for phone unlocking, however, other controversial portions of the DMCA haven't been addressed: The DMCA's 1201 provision also threatens to make it illegal, for instance, to "jailbreak" an Apple or Android tablet computer to install software Apple, Google, or another manufacturer didn't intend. The security industry has long complained that the law makes it potentially illegal to reverse engineer devices to test them for security flaws. And even exemptions to the provision, like one passed for jailbreaking phones and another for tools that read text aloud for the blind, don't necessarily cover those who make and distribute those jailbreaking or text-to-speech tools.

"Anti-circumvention means I can’t circumvent security locks. But it really means I can't make full use of the things I purchase." says Khanifar, who received a lawsuit threat from Motorola in 2005 for offering an unlocking service for phones, and now runs OpenSignal, a crowdsourced mapping company. "It's like having a lock on your door, and it's illegal to have a locksmith adjust it in any way...It’s quite bad for innovation across all classes of technology. We're asking Congress to look at this and repeal it."

A website set up by the group, FixTheDMCA.org, asks visitors to email and tweet at their legislators, asking for a bill that repeals the DMCA's section 1201. "We don’t expect this to be an easy battle," says Parker Higgins, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is working with Khanifar. "But really everything that people have discussed around jailbreaking and unlocking devices only goes part of the way towards solving this problem. As we see it, going the whole way means getting rid of 1201 altogether. We want to tell Congress we've found the root cause of the problem."

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center For Internet And Society, wrote a blog post earlier this week pointing to problems with the DMCA's 1201 provision that affect everyone from a long list of security researchers threatened by tech companies whose products they've reverse engineered to makers of generic printer cartridges and garage door openers.

"Technology will change, and these same DMCA problems will reoccur," Granick wrote. "But because the technologies are unfamiliar, and the markets new, we may be less likely to identify the consumer rights issues, to know how much better things would be with a healthy aftermarket."

Violations of the DCMA's 1201 provision are punishable with up to $500,000 in fines or five years in prison for a first offense, and $1 million or 10 years for repeated offenses. But just how the law is enforced remains unclear. According to the most recent numbers from the Cydia app store for jailbroken Apple devices, around 4.6 million iPad users have jailbroken their tablets, all potentially violating the law. The hackers who created those jailbreaking tools, such as those who released the popular evasi0n jailbreaking software last month, might be subject to penalties as well. No charges against jailbreakers have been filed yet.

“These popular tools that millions of people use might still leave people legally liable,” the EFF's Higgins told me earlier in the week. “Even if they’re not doing it yet, giving companies the legal power to abuse these laws makes me a little uneasy... [The ban on phone unlocking] is a symptom. The underlying problem is the anticircumvention provision. And that works against consumers’ interests every day.”

Check out Fix The DMCA's website here.

Follow me on Twitter, and check out my new book, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks and Hacktivists Aim To Free The World’s Information.