Monday, December 5th 2011
DMCA: The Push For Console And Tablet Jailbreak Exemptions Begin
Last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) successfully lobbied to make the jailbreaking of smartphones a legal exemption in the DMCA, much to the displeasure of Steve Jobs, who wanted to keep total control over what users could do with their expensive gadgets, but no longer could. Now, in a totally unsurprising and welcome move for ordinary consumers everywhere, the EFF have explained in a press release what the DMCA was supposed to do, how it can be misused and what they plan to do about it:
"The DMCA is supposed to block copyright infringement. But instead it can be misused to threaten creators, innovators, and consumers, discouraging them from making full and fair use of their own property," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "Hobbyists and tinkerers who want to modify their phones or video game consoles to run software programs of their choice deserve protection under the law. So do artists and critics who use short excerpts of video content to create new works of commentary and criticism. Copyright law shouldn't be stifling such uses - it should be encouraging them."Then they explained how they want to expand the scope of the exemption to cover more devices:
"We were thrilled that EFF won important exemptions to the DMCA in the last rulemaking," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "But technology has evolved over the last three years, and so it's important to expand these exemptions to cover the real-world uses of smartphones, tablets, video game consoles, DVDs, and video downloads.One can question why an expansion is needed at all though. Since all these devices work digitally and have related functionality, which is to process sound and video in some way, it's not completely clear why separate exemptions are needed for consoles and tablets when an exemption has already been established for smartphones. However, if successful, it will make the imposition on the ordinary consumer of draconian and ineffective DRM schemes by big corporations against the war on "piracy" even more futile. Perhaps the whole misbegotten DMCA will be repealed in time?
14 Comments on DMCA: The Push For Console And Tablet Jailbreak Exemptions Begin
it is MY tech that i purchased to use how I WANT wither thats legal or not its MY choice i paid for it i will do what i want with it fook the rules or laws needed
As for piracy there is one simple rule...
When there is DRM or Copyright protection newly released or not, there is always a way around it released you can never stop piracy unless you pull down the web
Its like the iphone, All my friends ever do is moan because they cant put things on it so they then ask me to jailbreak it but i refuse as its not something i care about or want to get into.
Imagine you sell a house to someone but rent the paint. whoever buys the house is limited to whatever paint you chose and if you decide to change it they just have to live with it.
Even though you actually bought the damn place you can't really do anything with it since serious modification will screw with the paint, can't make a new room since you'll have to make a door and that's gonna mess with the paint (you can't paint the new room either). you could get new furniture (although in apples case it needs to be certified first).
What we're trying to say is that if you buy a house, changing the curtains is not freedom and there is no reason behind not letting us do whatever we want with what we paid for.
My point is, how harsh of terms is a company allowed to put in their EULA and get away with? And my example may seem intense, but the sad truth is that it isn't too far off what happened to Graf_chokolo by Sony (twice).