Great victory in corporate control over the things we've bought!

[JKane]

Writing out how to protect and secure your laptops reminded me that I wanted to tell everybody that not all is doom and gloom when it comes to our digital rights.

Years ago, a bunch of very old men--without even the understanding of the Internet as 'a series of tubes' did what they were told to do by their bosses, i.e. their benefactors at pretty much all corporations involved in media production/distribution (plus some others). Unfortunately these men were in the US Congress and what they did is known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was YET ANOTHER horrible law known by an acronym starting with D signed into law by the beloved President Clinton. DMCA pretty much ended the 'fair use' doctrine many continued to think applied and as technology advanced it became more and more onerous.

Making a digital copy of *music you bought* so you can play it anywhere? Technically illegal. Getting past copy protection on that music or video game you bought SO THAT IT WILL NOT DAMAGE YOUR COMPUTER? Absolutely illegal!

Decrypting the laughably bad protection on a DVD so you can watch it on a computer running Linux, your cell phone, or from a file you can keep on your computer instead of carrying around the disk? By Jack Valenti's rotting corpse you're going to jail!

Well, NOT ANYMORE!!!

You may have heard something about how you may now 'jailbreak' your iPhone. You always could, of course--to get by Apple's endless restrictions on what you could or couldn't do, and their controls on who could sell or even GIVE you software to run on YOUR PHONE, just now you can't go to jail for it! Though Apple may still void your warranty and deny you future software updates...

More interestingly, you can also go beyond that and UNLOCK your phone from the carrier you bought it from. Now, with the iPhone on AT&T it is a somewhat Pyrrhic victory as T-Mobile's network is no gem plus *just* different enough to not work at 3G speed for DATA and Verizon's network (as well as Sprint's, I believe) is entirely different technology. If you travel it may be of use though--you might be able to get a SIM from a local 3G provider that will provide much cheaper calling and data overseas. Even on AT&T you could often ask for this unlocking for that specific purpose on their other phones--but they wouldn't do it on the iPhone.

The legal right to decrypt DVDs YOU OWN for non-commercial private use isn't quite established as 100% legal, but it seems it's a lot less illegal than it was (yet doing the same with Blu-Ray is still apparently illegal!).

There's a couple other exceptions added that're more interesting to geeks like me, but one specifically speaks to some BULLSHIT that just cropped up recently. Amazon figured a nice feature to give the Kindle would be the ability to read a book to you in a simple computer voice. Many publishers balked at this, forced the feature removed from smaller company's e-readers, and tried to bully Amazon into disabling it because they felt the audiobook rights were being violated (even though there's a night a day difference between a Stephen Hawking-ish voice stumbling over the goofy words in Harry Potter and a celebrity, actor, or author actually reading it to you...). The deaf and many others took great exception to the publisher's assertions, of course. And now, it is now 100% legal for any eBook to be read aloud, even if you have to crack the DRM (encryption) of an eBook you bought to do it.

My god I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation! I have *got* to get around to donating to them, like I've meant to for so long! I also intend to have them in my will.

[Guest FourAces]

JK interesting post.

I just wanna add a few of my thoughts and knowledge about the iPhone. T-Mobile actually does a mini training for their tech employees on the iPhone. There are approx 250,000 iPhones running on the T-Mo network at this time. As you correctly mentioned the 3G data connection will not work but EDGE will. More importantly most T-Mobile iPhone customers use their Wifi which is actually faster than 3G anyway. I, for a while had a iPhone on T-Mobile and did not have any issues with it.

Also just to confirm for you Sprint & Verizon are both CDMA carriers and the iPhone is GSM technology so you are correct even an unlocked iPhone cannot work on their networks. Oddly CDMA is one of the least popular mobile technologies in the world. Nearly all carriers use GSM.

Lastly, Another result of the tech laws you speak of is related to online poker / gaming sites. For years it has been very foggy if they are legal to play on or not in the US. It became so unclear a few years back the largest online site in the world Party Poker withdrew completely from the US market. There is currently a bill before congress to clarify the law and hopefully to make online gaming legal in the US.

Anyway, maybe not quite as much knowledge as you but I do have a fascination with these issues.

[Guest Klair]

Anyway, maybe not quite as much knowledge as you but I do have a fascination with these issues.

The same goes for me. I can understand why companies want to retain their proprietary rights, but they also need to realize that we now live in a technological world and no matter what they do to try to prevent so-called piracy, it never takes long for someone to figure out how to beat that.

The cat and mouse game they play is going to continue no matter how much protection they put in their DVDs or whatever. Many of these companies, when they can't stop the piracy they try resorting to lawsuits, which really has probably done them more harm than good in the long run.

We live in a technological world. If they can't cope with it and join it, then they're in the wrong business.