{"id":178556,"date":"2018-10-27T20:55:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T01:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/10\/27\/some-sanity-from-the-library-of-congress\/"},"modified":"2018-10-27T20:55:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-28T01:55:00","slug":"some-sanity-from-the-library-of-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/10\/27\/some-sanity-from-the-library-of-congress\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Sanity from the Library of Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>The Library of Congress regulates how people interact with copyrighted digital equipment, and they <a href=\"https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/article\/xw9bwd\/1201-exemptions-right-to-repair\">just ruled that you have a right to break the manufacturers&#8217; digital rights management (DRM) in order to repair your device<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office just <a href=\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/public-inspection.federalregister.gov\/2018-23241.pdf\">proposed new rules<\/a> that will give consumers and independent repair experts wide latitude to legally hack embedded software on their devices in order to repair or maintain them. This exemption to copyright law will apply to smartphones, tractors, cars, smart home appliances, and many other devices. <\/p>\n<p>The move is a landmark win for the \u201cright to repair\u201d movement; essentially, the federal government has ruled that consumers and repair professionals have the right to legally hack the firmware of \u201clawfully acquired\u201d devices for the \u201cmaintenance\u201d and \u201crepair\u201d of that device. Previously, it was legal to hack tractor firmware for the purposes of repair; it is now legal to hack many consumer electronics.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, it allows breaking digital rights management (DRM) and embedded software locks for \u201cthe maintenance of a device or system \u2026 in order to make it work in accordance with its original specifications\u201d or for \u201cthe repair of a device or system \u2026 to a state of working in accordance with its original specifications.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has always been a horrible law, but no where is it worse in cases where it allows manufacturers to lock people out from repairing items that they bought and paid for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Library of Congress regulates how people interact with copyrighted digital equipment, and they just ruled that you have a right to break the manufacturers&#8217; digital rights management (DRM) in order to repair your device: The Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office just proposed new rules that will give consumers and independent repair experts &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[520,428,437,382],"class_list":["post-178556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-copyright","tag-ip","tag-regulation","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178556"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}