Reading 13

            From the reading about reverse engineering, it seems like the DMCA isn’t a huge fan of it. A lot of the FAQ article focused on things that were “legally risky”, a lot of which seemed to sum up reverse engineering process. The comment about how you could most likely go ahead and do it if nobody explicitly said you couldn’t (“For example, if a license agreement authorizes you to “use” the software, and it does not expressly prohibit reverse engineering, that may be all the permission you need.”), which to me seems like the DMCA does disapprove and reverse engineers can just sort of get away with it. Plus, the case studies in that article are downright messes; it seems like everyone this week was subject to massive appeals and re-trying and nobody being able to agree. Copyright users aren’t allowed to copy an original author’s content (ie, putting a movie on youtube), and companies are allowed to put DRM on their material to ensure that nobody tries to copy it or use it for purposes they didn’t intend.

            On the surface level, it does seem right for companies to be able to protect their content from being ripped off by placing some sort of protection on it. That’s a thing that people do all the time, they put locks on things that are theirs to keep people out and to protect what’s inside. The DVD companies definitely feel justified because the locks prohibit a lot of basic piracy from happening, so that’s a decently good use case. It doesn’t stop it entirely, but piracy isn’t awesome because it deprives the justified creator from their financial benefit for creating, and a lock on DVDs is a relatively easy way to curb some of that. That one I do understand. In that one, it’s more just convenience that causes people to want to take content off of their own DVDs, so I think it’s probably justified having DRM on there and a little wrong to take it in that case. It’s hard, though, because people that are doing that could just be moving the DVD content they’ve legally bought to their one desktop at home so they don’t have to worry about losing the DVD because their dog always eats them. It’s hard to say that people are wrong for using the content they’ve purchased in ways they want to use it. I feel like “supportably illegal” is more where I’m at than calling them “definitely immoral”. It’s kind of grey, there. They probably shouldn’t do it, the law says they shouldn’t, but they did spend their money to support the artist, and now they’re just trying to use their legal property in the way they see fit. The DMCA doesn’t decide where litter box purchasers are allowed to keep their litter boxes, after all. In a lot of products, once it’s yours, it’s yours. But it makes sense why they implement these specific locks, so I think I do have to stand behind them here. For digital media, to protect the hard-earned monetary reward that the content creator should be able to receive for their good and purchasable contribution to society.

            When it comes to the car/tractor thing, though, I think we’ve gotten a little bit ridiculous. The Wired article about John Deere was very fired up about losing the idea of real ownership, and I can’t say that I really blame them. A tractor really obviously isn’t software, and I don’t think it falls under copyright. There were plenty of other ways its intellectual property can have the force of law behind it (trademarks of the John Deere name, industrial design, patents on the special tractor parts that make it good), but copyright on its software to the point that software needs to be protected beyond someone being able to diagnose and fix it on their own (hello, American dream? This is tractors we’re talking about. This is the group of the population who can and will fix it by themselves because they’re old-school, resourceful, and they can) seems a little ridiculous to me. You bought a tractor, you bought the car, you should be able to tinker around with what’s under the hood that might be broken or that you disagree with. The article mentioned that people could alter its emissions by manipulating the software—that’s now an illegal emissions issue. Copyright shouldn’t extend its arm that far into protecting different areas of law. Its job is content, not material goods with some software behind them. I think diagnosis should be available, there. Let the owner have a crack at what’s under the hood—they paid for it, and if it’s faulty or they’re unhappy they should have the chance to remedy it. If they didn’t like the way the seat sat in 1960, they were allowed to take a screwdriver to it and improve the design. Why can’t they do that today?

            To me, it seems like legitimate researchers should be able to reverse engineer and poke software looking for knowledge or for bugs/security problems. I don’t really want to open the floor to developers though; it seems like that would start a lot of people just trying to rip off other people’s code and steal their business out from underneath them. Don’t forget, software is eating the world.

            It’s challenging, because publishers don’t have end-control over books. Books are also much less difficult to copy than streams of bits in movies. Physical products, though, I think should belong belong (not fake belong) to the person who purchased them, which access to at least an API of the proprietary software in it, if not more. Do I own a DVD, or am I just leasing it for the life of that silver shell? I’m not sure, but those locks don’t bother me as much. I would feel better, though, if people could truly own the cars they buy. Even though I get software is business advantage, anymore.