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I thought this may make interesting reading for anyone not subscribed
to the free software foundation.
Paul
Free Software Foundation
Dear Paul Sutton,
We have written previously about the organizations and individuals
<http://www.defectivebydesign.org/meet-the-drm-drones> who opposed
exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA)
anti-circumvention provisions. These drones oppose the rights of users
to backup, modify, and study the software and devices that we own. The
DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions create legal penalties for simply
accessing your software under your own terms, and raises those penalties
even higher should dare to share the tools needed to do so. It creates
real penalties for anyone who wants to avoid Digital Restrictions
Management (DRM) controls. The granting of exemptions to these
totalitarian rules is a broken and half-hearted attempt to limit the
damage these rules bring, granting for 3 years a reprieve for certain
specified devices and software.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) side-stepped this process and
sent a letter
<http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/USCO-letters/EPA_Letter_to_USCO_re_1201.
pdf>
separately directly to the Copyright Office. In the letter they argued
that users should not be able to access and modify the software on their
own vehicles. In their estimation, this would enable users to violate
emissions controls. So it would be better for them if the hammer of the
DMCA remained hanging over the head of every user or researcher who
wanted to access the software on their vehicle.
Of course, just a few months after telling the Copyright Office that
users couldn't be trusted with access to their devices, the EPA revealed
a major scandal involving Volkswagen. It turns out that Volkswagen had
for many years cheated the emissions test performed by the EPA.
Volkswagen had surreptitiously included some code in their diesel
vehicles that would detect the EPA's tests and have the car change its
performance in order to meet EPA mandates. Once the test was over, the
code would revert the vehicle to its normal, high-polluting functioning.
This scam apparently went on for years before it was detected by
researchers.
Of course the irony is that if users and researchers had the right to
access the software on their cars, they might have discovered this fraud
years ago. As Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center
<https://www.softwarefreedom.org/> noted
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/nyregion/volkswagens-diesel-fraud-mak
es-critic-of-secret-code-a-prophet.html>
"If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a
right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they
would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting
caught would terrify them.â Volkswagen is already a contributor on the
kernel Linux, and as Bradley M. Kuhn, President and Distinguished
Technologist of the Software Freedom Conservancy
<https://sfconservancy.org/> pointed out it is likely that Volkswagen
vehicles already contain some free software. But some is not all, and
clearly they kept much of their software secret in order to hide their
scam. If all the software on the vehicles was free software they never
could have perpetrated this scheme.
Researchers also could have discovered the fraud had they not been
hindered by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, as Kit Walsh of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/researchers-could-have-uncovered-
volkswagens-emissions-cheat-if-not-hindered-dmca>.
The EPA of course failed to understand all this when drafting their
letter promoting the use of DRM.
But there is a more galling fact at play here. What the EPA argued in
their letter was that the exemption should not be granted under the DMCA
as a means for enforcing efficiency standards. That clearly isn't the
stated purpose of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and
highlights one of the fundamental problems with DRM. That a government
agency would try to commandeer the DRM of private actors, not to enforce
copyright but as a means to enforce something wholly unrelated,
demonstrates a central truth: DRM is not about copyright; it's about
control. It's about dominating users. It's about spying on them. It's
about installing rootkits <http://www.defectivebydesign.org/sony> onto
their computers. It has nothing to do with rights, and everything to do
with restriction.
We can't let governments and corporation use DRM to take over our lives.
This is what you can do today to fight back:
If you microblog, please share the following message (or your own) with
the hashtag #DRMshame. We strongly suggest that if you use Twitter
<https://www.fsf.org/twitter> to publicly call the EPA and Volkswagen
out, you do it in a way that avoids using proprietary software:
* @EPA You should be ashamed of yourself for trying to use Digital
Restrictions Management #DRMshame https://u.fsf.org/fraud
* @VW All software on your vehicles needs to be free software without
DRM to restore our trust #DRMshame https://u.fsf.org/fraud
Here's what else you can do.:
* Join the Defective By Design <https://defectivebydesign.org/join>
mailing list to keep up to date on the on-going fight against DRM.
* To help fund our work, consider donating to the FSF
<https://donate.fsf.org>.
Happy hacking,
Donald Robertson
Copyright and Licensing Associate
Follow us on GNU social <https://status.fsf.org/fsf> | Subscribe to our
blogs via RSS <https://fsf.org/blogs/RSS> | Join us as an associate
member <https://www.fsf.org/jf>
Sent from the Free Software Foundation,
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Boston, Massachusetts 02110-1335
United States
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