Copyright law

As applied to modern technology, copyright law is a way for companies to legally lock you out of owning what you buy.

Most articles focus on the USA, because the situation is pretty severe there. I’m going to look at both the USA and the EU.

Copyright law in USA

In the USA, the software used to add restrictions on things you buy is protected by the DMCA, making it a criminal offense to circumvent it (a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison).

This is section 1201 of title 17:

No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

(1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that— (A )is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effect

That means if you want to get out of any of the following situations, you will be committing a criminal offense and can go to prison:

• You buy something from a provider, who can decide to take it away from you at any moment (a game on Steam, a movie on Nextflix, a book on Amazon, etc.). As a bonus, they can force you to only use it on a specific device, due to DRM (and removing that is criminal too).
• You get a new software update that slows down your phone, and you want to disable it. Even if you manage to disable it, providers can decide to only accept the newest version, and if you try to get around that, it’s a criminal offense. Your only option is to buy a new phone.
• A company forcibly installs a LLM agent in your phone which has root-level access to everything, while you (the user who bought the phone) are blocked from having the same level of access
• You want to repair something that’s broken, but the company uses a software lock to make that thing perform worse or even break unless an official technician repairs it (see the case with John Deere)

Copyright law in EU

The situation in the EU is similar, but not as intense. In EU Directive 2001/29/EC Article 6:

Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, rental, advertisement for sale or rental, or possession for commercial purposes of devices, products or components or the provision of services which:

(a) are promoted, advertised or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of, or

(b) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or

(c) are primarily designed, produced, adapted or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of,

any effective technological measures.

The technological measures applied voluntarily by rightholders, including those applied in implementation of voluntary agreements, and technological measures applied in implementation of the measures taken by Member States, shall enjoy the legal protection provided for in paragraph 1.

And article 5:

Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations to the reproduction right provided for in Article 2 in the following cases: … (b) in respect of reproductions on any medium made by a natural person for private use and for ends that are neither directly nor indirectly commercial, on condition that the rightholders receive fair compensation which takes account of the application or non-application of technological measures referred to in Article 6 to the work or subject-matter concerned;

It is less strict than DMCA section 1201. There are some exceptions, e.g. for interoperability or security testing. The penalties are not explicitly defined (article 8, “Member States shall provide appropriate sanctions and remedies…”), so they may be less severe in different member states than in the USA (e.g. only civil and not criminal). Furthermore, there can be exemptions for private copying, so it won’t apply if you’re de-DRMing a book you bought to read it on a different device than a kindle.