BDYHAX 2017 – You are Not an Inkjet Printer – Keynote by Cory Doctorow
Speaker: Cory Doctorow The DMCA was passed in 1998, its notorious section 1201 designed to protect DRM and thwart people who tried to reconfigure their DVD to play out-of-region discs; then it was used to sue companies that refilled printer cartridges. Today, that dumb, abusive law has metastasized: since it prohibits modifying any system that restricts access to copyrighted works, and since software is a copyrighted work, anything with software in it can be turned into a legal no-go zone that you can’t alter or even do basic security research on, just by adding a thin shell of DRM around it. We’ve already got DRM in insulin pumps (computers we put in our bodies) and medical scanners (computers we put our bodies into) — not to mention voting machines, cars, tractors, and kitty-litter trays. The prohibition on security disclosures and modifications of these devices isn’t a harmless quirk of that last-millennium law: it’s an existential threat to the future of the human race and a moral hazard for every company. We already have computers in our bodies and more are coming. There will be serious problems with these computers, but DRM will only make them (much) worse. We can and will keep the DMCA out of our body modifications
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