EFF: Did Congress Really Expect Us to Whittle Our Own Personal Jailbreaking Tools?
Did Congress Really Expect Us to Whittle Our Own Personal Jailbreaking Tools? In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and profoundly changed the relationship of Americans to their property. Section 1201 of the DMCA bans the bypassing of “access controls” for copyrighted works. Originally, this meant that even though you owned your DVD player, and even though it was legal to bring DVDs home with you from your European holidays, you weren’t allowed to change your DVD player so that it would play those out-of-region DVDs. DVDs were copyrighted works, the region-checking code was an access control, and so even though you owned the DVD, and you owned the DVD player, and even though you were allowed to watch the disc, you weren’t allowed to modify your DVD player to play your DVD (which you were allowed to watch). Experts were really worried about this: law professors, technologists and security experts saw that soon we’d have software—that is, copyrighted...