Cybercrud and Anti-circumventiontopia: Reflections on Enshittification, EULA Roofieing, and Related Phenomena

by Jan Malakhovski, version 1.0.0, created , published , updated

Between 1970s and early 2000s it appeared as if we were steadily moving into computer-enabled utopia. Today, we somehow ended up in cybercrud-filled anti-utopia instead. How did this happen? What can personally you and we, collectively, do about it? This article explains how and why anti-circumvention and shareholder primacy laws, when applied together, degrade our whole civilization's efficiency while also making it culturally amnesiac and horrifically easy to destroy. Then, it discusses a bunch of possible solutions.

Changelog

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v1.0.0 -

Table of Contents

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Introduction

You know, I can’t help but notice that we live in the bona fide cybercrud anti-utopia now.

In “Computopia and Cybercrud” by Ted Nelson (1977)

Ted Nelson described most of the modern computer tech and related phenomena:

all with surprising level of detail.2

After describing all that, Ted Nelson then goes on to describe a trap our civilization could fall into as a result of all those technologies: cybercrud, which is defined as, to paraphrase, a state when people accept awful and inefficient ways of doing things because “this is how you do that on a computer”.

Most people thinking about computing between 1970s and early 2000s, including myself, thought they were steadily moving into Computopia, i.e., a utopia enabled by computers. As far as I can tell, the main questions then were what effects would the following cybercrudy issues place on human culture and productivity:

While some of the above cybercrud did happen and some of it does still persist, most of those issues have good workarounds, so those issues are not the cybercrud most people experience daily.

Instead, we now live in a civilization where:

How did this happen? What are the reasons for this?

Well, if you ask Cory Doctorow to summarize his ideas, he would probably explain it like this: US antitrust laws were essentially repealed in 1970s, which lead to FTC becoming unable to prevent unrestricted business consolidation (creation of monopolies), computers made “twiddling” with things easy, companies started to abuse it to inflict cybercrud on users for profit, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 1201 and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) made it hard for other companies and consumers to resist the results.

To promote his ideas, he wrote a book about enshittification and went on a book tour. His solutions involve companies committing to Ulysses pacts, Big Tech regulation, breaking up of Big Tech monopolies, rolling back DMCA Section 1201 and CFAA in the US and/or Europe abandoning its equivalent anti-circumvention laws in return for US tariffs.

Meanwhile, Louis Rossmann would probably explain it like this: consumer products, after they are bought, are consumer property, manufacturers should have no say in what consumers do with them after the sale, but FTC abandoned enforcement of consumer protection laws (on its own, it’s corruption, nothing really prevents them from doing it, they could resume doing at any moment!), which is why companies started to ignore property rights and inflict cybercrud on users for profit, DMCA Section 1201 made it hard for consumers and other businesses to resist the results.

To promote his ideas, he made a video that accidentally went viral and follow-up ones, and in those he explains how they could go about lobbying to repel DMCA Section 1201 in the US instead.

So, I can’t help but notice that their explanations and solutions have some common points. Also, I can’t help but notice that, on left-right political spectrum, Doctorow’s explanations and solutions lean left and Rossmann’s lean right. Unfortunately, as things are in US politics at the moment, even though these two people talk about similar things, they are not allowed to talk to or even mention each other, apparently. Additionally, I have a slightly different incentive-based explanation for how and why our civilization got into this state and some more thoughts on the abovementioned and other possible solutions to getting out of it.

Hume’s guillotine principle, to paraphrase it shortly, says that “given a set of available actions, an evidence of what will or might happen should each of them be taken is not an objective answer for which one should be taken, nor, in general, for what objective should be pursued”. Or, even more shortly, “‘is, will, or might’ does not imply ‘ought’”.

This article was born from my desire to analyze the abovementioned issues logically, with Hume’s guillotine principle taken into account when there are several possible actions, and to discuss everything relevant in a single place, with as little tribal politics as possible.

The rest of this article is organized as follows:

Prerequisites

Everything is a computer now, allowing developers/manufacturers to be evil more easily

Most modern things are now essentially conventional computers in fancy cases with fancy peripherals:

So, before ubiquitous computerization, it simply was not feasible for a device manufacturer to deny its users some of the features of the device, or degrade the service in some other way, by first checking for permission with the manufacturer over the Internet. Now, it’s easy.

Everything is a computer now, allowing users to modify behaviour of their devices more easily

On the other hand, essentially all modern computing devices are Turing-complete. A computer with enough memory can compute literally anything we know how to compute in any other way.

Which means that, normally, there should be natural limit to the amount of cybercrud a manufacturer can inflict upon its users before its users simply

Therefore, the state that we observe in the real world is not natural. In a world without regulation, that much cybercrud would simply create a vibrant market of workarounds. Which, in turn, would cause development and continuous support for the code implementing those restrictions cost more than most developers/manufacturers would be making by forcing those restrictions onto their users. Which is why, most likely, those restrictions simply would not exist.

Remember how popup ads vanished from existence as soon as all browsers implemented popup blockers? This is why Google is trying its best to kill ad-blockers like uBlock Origin and nice private alternative UI apps like NewPipe and Grayjay, see there and below. They make user abuse unprofitable: YouTube spends a month of time and much money to implement a new anti-ad-blocking thing and then a couple of volunteers figure out how to work around it in a day and share their results with everyone a day later.

A whole lot of countries are signatories to World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)’s treaties of 1996. The result of those treaties are what we now call anti-circumvention laws.

The US version of this is Section 1201 of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which says:

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

then proceeds to explain how exceptions to the above rule would be decided and updated, then says:

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 bit of copy-paste of the above with “effectively controls access to a work” replaced with “effectively protects a right of a copyright owner” and similar.]

The EU version of this is Article 6 of the “Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society” also known as “2001 EU Copyright Directive”, which says:

Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective.

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:

any effective technological measures.

[… plus a bunch of definitions and exceptions.]

In other words, if a copyright title holder3 adds a technological measure to control access to something that can be copyrighted and you try to work around it, help other people to work around it, or tell other people how to work around it, you are now a criminal and are subject to some crazy punishments.

In the US those are codified in Section 1204 of DMCA:

Any person who violates section 1201 or 1202 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain—

In the EU, all member states have their own punishments, but the general idea of those is similar to the above.

Note that these laws are curious in that they unconditionally forbid helping others to circumvent or telling others how to circumvent, but an individual or an organization is allowed to circumvent protections on legally obtained materials in some limited exceptional cases, if they do it only for themselves.

In the US version, the current list of exceptions is maintained by the Library of Congress and can be seen there, it gets updated every 3 years.

In the EU version, similar exceptions are codified directly into law instead.

Motivation and Effects

These laws were put into place to try and make Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, like region locks on DVDs and such, feasible. Without anti-circumvention laws they are absolutely unfeasible because a DRM system has to have both the encrypted data and the key for it on user’s device. Some technically savvy users will inevitably manage to copy the key, and the DRM will become moot. So, the idea was to scare technically savvy users into compliance, apparently.

Except, the whole point of media publishing businesses is to promote and then distribute a piece of media as widely as possible as quickly as possible, while the interest is high, to get most profit. Which means that at least some of those devices that piece of media will be distributed to will be vulnerable to cracking, and somebody will figure out the key, in secret, and then post it on the Internet, anonymously. Cryptographic keys are not programs, they are small, and once they are out, they are out, no more effort on the part of the person who developed the crack to get the key from the device is required (unlike with the case of emulators, for example). At which point the developer of the DRM system in question either has to try and make the whole Internet forget the key exists, start producing new pieces of media encrypted with new keys (making all old players impossible to use and, thus, pissing off all lawful users), or capitulate.

Then, to add insult to injury, as soon as a piece of media gets ripped into a DRM-free file format and starts being distributed via BitTorrent or such, then pirating that media actually becomes more convenient than trying to use the DRMed version.

In short, a quarter century since have shown, anti-circumvention laws did not really help with piracy.4

But what anti-circumvention laws did have an effect on is they permitted developers/manufacturers to turn arbitrary business model preferences into law by employing the following method:

Which, effectively, allows any technical restriction that can be expressed in code to become law since removal of digital locks is illegal under anti-circumvention laws.

This is how “‘Driver and Front Passenger Seat Heated Function’ subscription package” became a thing that could actually happen.

This is also why many products now cost so much more than their manufacturing costs. Jet printer ink, for example, is cheap to produce, it’s just a coal emulsion. But most printers now have computers inside them that ensure that only authorized cartridges can be used and those cartridges have tiny computers in them that ensure that their ink level only ever goes down, bricking them if it does not. Removing those functions from printers or ink cartridges you own is illegal because those programs are copyrighted and have digital locks on them.

Jay Freeman and Cory Doctorow call the resulting situation “felony contempt of business model”. Louis Rossmann, meanwhile, frequently (but, usually, implicitly) points out that this situation also violates property rights of users of those devices.

Terms of Use anti-circumvention law: Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)

Additionally, in the US, there’s another relevant law called Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which, among other things, forbids access to computer systems “without authorization”. The issue is that it does not define what “authorization” means, precisely.

Motivation and Effects

This law was invented to make all possible cracking (colloquially, “hacking”) activities into unapologetic felonies, but its current interpretation by US courts also treats “Terms of Use” violations as “unauthorized access”, which essentially turns CFAA into another anti-circumvention law.

This interpretation helps in propping up products and services whose business models involve gate-keeping access to data they don’t actually own copyright to (or should not own copyright to if things were saner), like social networks, blogging platforms, scientific publishers, libraries of public domain books, historical, judicial, and document archives, various compendiums, etc. Such businesses need only put some technical access restrictions in place and attempt to ban at least some of their “Terms of Use” violators to make data-scraping them illegal.

In other words, CFAA makes many legitimate uses of adversarial interoperability into felonies, which allows Big Tech firms to pull the ladders they used to become Big after themselves. For instance, Facebook started as a nicer and more private UI for MySpace, asking its users to give them their MySpace logins and passwords and then pretending to be them on MySpace while data-scraping all relevant data from there, which eventually allowed them to take over MySpace’s user base. But when Facebook became big and evil and Power Ventures tried to do the same to Facebook, Facebook hit them with CFAA, see this and that. Similarly, today, if you make a tool that automates some third-party service cybercrud away to make it all more user-friendly that service can sue you out of existence.

For simple consumers it can get pretty awful too, like in the case of Aaron Swartz. But it only gets large-scale-awful when DMCA Section 1201 applies, otherwise, a service would be hard-pressed to argue in court that a user was not “authorized” to download something when they use the same methods and tools all other users use. (Though, as the above links show, evidently, Facebook will try anyway.)

Therefore, in cases where DMCA Section 1201 does not apply, users can usually scrape data without obvious “Terms of Service” violations by doing it slowly enough and by cooperating their scraping activities, like with

What CFAA hits the most, however, is legitimate security research. It makes many of such activities outright illegal or very risky.

For example, if, while working with a web service, you notice something strange in your browser’s Network Monitor, decide it might just be a server-side bug, confirm it by sending a manually-crafted HTTP request, as the scientific method requires, and get data you were not supposed to have as a result, you just violated CFAA. In some cases you can even do this completely by accident by mistyping a URL.

The law won’t care, if the server is buggy and you hitting that bug violates their “Terms of Use”, touching that bug is illegal. The safest thing you can do after that is forget you ever found the issue. If you report it to the company running the service, the company is likely to panic, “hackers could be stealing everything!”, go into damage-control mode, hire lawyers, and those, instead of recommending they stop being stupid and simply hire someone to fix the bug (and that researcher might be a good first choice, by the way), do what they are being paid for, which do legal things, so they invoke CFAA and sue the researcher to shut him/her up instead.

Under CFAA, a security researcher can play around with a service and report any issues he/she discovers without it potentially ending in jail time only if the service explicitly hired the researcher to do it. It sufficient to say that not many companies actually do that. On the other hand, the criminals are not interested in reporting any issues they can profit from, they will happily and quietly exploit any bugs they find for years, if they can.

The result of this that the cracking situation is now actually worse than it was ever before. Selling of data dumps from such criminal activities on Dark Web marketplaces is now extremely common.

Shareholder primacy

Finally, note that, according to US law, a for-profit corporation has fiduciary duties towards it shareholders, also known as shareholder primacy. See Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. for a lawsuit that instituted this rule. The situation is pretty similar in many other jurisdictions.

In other words, in the US and many other countries, a for-profit public corporation must be doing its best to maximize its profits, or be subject to lawsuits by its shareholders.

The consequence of this is that, in the US and many other countries, if a for-profit public corporation can extract more profit from its users, employees, or business partners while staying on the inside of the law, it must do so.

In other words, a for-profit public corporation is forced into becoming lawfully evil, if it can get more profit that way.

This is why, even though I like libertarianism in general, mainstream market libertarianism does not make sense to me. Very little regulation? In isolation, sounds fine to me. Shareholder primacy? In isolation, sounds fine to me too. Both taken together? A plot for an anti-utopia novel (the grim-darkness of which increases with more venture capital and high-frequency trading of public stocks, since these activities increase shareholder’s time discounting coefficients).

When you live inside such a novel, is it at all surprising when Google abandons its “Don’t be evil” motto and then becomes evil, hospitals start underpaying their nursing staff simply because they can, Amazon starts forcing their drivers and warehouse employees into skipping bathroom breaks, etc? No, it’s an anti-utopia, it’s how the plot is supposed to go!

Additionally, I have a problem with how it was forced on all US companies all at once with a single court case. Some of them might have wanted to reclassify under 501(c)(3) if they knew that was coming, but, nope.

Also, I find it kind of absurd that the law in all countries known to me restricts the available choices to just “for-profit” and “nonprofit”. Why can’t you have a “for happiness of my employees first, my users second, my profit third” public company, for example?

As shall be discussed below, there are ways shareholder primacy can be made to work for consumers too. But why do you have to go through complex product licensing acrobatics to attempt to reach such a state?

And how does a public company go about protecting their employees from their shareholders? Sure, if those employees are not easy to replace, it’s easy to justify the benefits given to them. But what if they are, like nurses or truck drivers?

The traditional way to solve this is unions, but those create their own problems. It’s also absurd that a conscientious company that plans to go public and wants to protect its employees from its future shareholders needs to force them into unionizing first.

“Hey, IRS, what do I do if I want to have a company that works ‘for happiness of its consumers first, profit second’?”
“That’s not a valid US legal entity type, please choose between ‘for-profit’ and ‘nonprofit’ instead.”
“But my activities would not be allowed under 501(c)(3).”
“Then your company should be a for-profit entity.”
“But my businesses could become very profitable if I start abusing my employees and my users. I see everyone else doing it, I don’t want my shareholders forcing me into doing it too.”
“Make a private company and do whatever you want.”
“But I don’t have the money to start it myself!”
“Can’t help you. Go take a loan, or something. Have a good day.”

Consequences

Each of the above laws, in separation, could be bad enough, but their combination is absolutely insidious.

Civilization-level cybercrud

Even with anti-circumvention laws applied, a manufacturer or a service provider could simply decide not to be evil, put no technical access control measures in place and allow their users to do whatever they want with their devices and download any publicly available data they provide without artificial restrictions.

But, as noted above, in the US and many other countries, this is not true for public corporations. For those, if they can extract more profit from their users by inflicting cybercrud on them, they must do so, or risk being sued for lost profits by their shareholders.

The main effect of the above is that we now live in a world where many technical things are essentially required, by law, to be stuffed with as much cybercrud as their users will tolerate before abandoning them by making various enshittification and EULA roofieing business models into standard operating procedures for most businesses.

This is also why some parts of modern tech are better than others. After all, anti-circumvention laws:

Creation of monopolies

The combination of all of the above laws also naturally creates monopolies since creation of competition by reverse-engineering and data-scraping of most products and services for interoperability purposes is now illegal.

Poor cultural heritage preservation

Copyright is awful for cultural heritage preservation, see “Digital Preservation and Copyright” by Peter B. Hirtle (2003?) which gives a good overview of the issue of digital archiving, “Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter the Public Domain?: Empirical Tests of Copyright Term Extension” by Christopher Buccafusco and Paul J. Heald (2012) and “How Copyright Keeps Works Disappeared” by Paul J. Heald (2013) for some factual statistics, a Wikipedia article on the topic, and the numerous famous cases of things preserved by pirates, most notably:

On the other hand, there’s a long list of media for which their copyright title holders cared so little that those pieces of media became lost, like, for example, Apollo 11 coverage on UK television.

Archival of media is not against the law unless you distribute that media without copyright title holder’s permission before its copyright expires. But after it does expire, you or your descendants could then share your archives with the public. Historically, this is how many, if not most, lost media pieces got re-discovered. Though, note that the fact that copyright term lengths extensions made it essentially impossible that you yourself could share your archives eventually and that you now have to depend on your descendants being conscientious enough and not just throw out all your stuff is absurd.

Technically speaking, in most jurisdictions, archiving of lawfully obtained media is an outright copyright exception. In places where it’s not or when those exceptions don’t exactly apply, like in most cases involving private individuals in the US, it’s usually still covered by fair use/fair dealing or similar.

With anti-circumvention laws, however, simply the act of archiving DRM- and Terms-of-Use-protected data became illegal!

One can argue that those laws are usually written in a way that allows non-profit archives to circumvent DRM and archive things. Which is true both in the US and EU versions. The issue with that, however, is that archives employ archivists, not super-human computer security experts able to break any DRM on demand. Which means that, to archive a piece of media, a non-profit archive has to depend on there being some pirates interested in breaking that particular piece of media from under DRM and sharing their results with the public, despite the crazy potential punishments.

Additionally, note that

These observations combined mean that either

The above examples clearly show that, in practice, the latter is what usually happens.

Which means that

In other words, both non-profit media archive operations and business models of many modern media companies require that there are pirates that break DRM locks and share the results publicly. If nobody would break the law, non-profit archives would be archiving almost nothing and copyright title holder companies would eventually end up owning copyright to content they don’t actually have any working copies of.

It’s just those companies would prefer those DRM locks would get broken right after they sold most of the copies that would ever be bought. This way they could benefit in multiple ways all at once: they would get most of the profit from sales, but could then abandon responsibility for actually preserving the media to the pirates, and if that media ever gets popular again and they would like to have it again, they could simply download it from BitTorrent or whatever. And if they feel particularly evil, they can also try catching and extorting some of those pirates that are preserving their media for them. After all, this is legal. So, why not? Right?

“Socialize the Costs, Privatize the Profits!”

Civilization-level apocalypse made easy

What gives me the worst nightmares, however, is what would happen if our Sun had a flare event similar or more powerful than the Carrington Event (bold emphasis mine):

The Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, peaking on 1–2 September 1859 during solar cycle 10. It created strong auroral displays that were reported globally and caused sparking and even fires in telegraph stations.
[…]
Because of the geomagnetically induced current from the electromagnetic field, telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks. Some operators were able to continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies.

Imagine this happening tomorrow when the American side of Earth is turned towards the Sun. All consumer-grade electronic devices in the US are fried instantly, anything not archived on non-conducting media and not stored in grounded Faraday cages or underwater is lost forever. Since some governmental, military, and financial things are stored in this way, most important infrastructure servers and document archives survive the event and get re-connected to the surviving parts of the Internet eventually.

However, most consumer-grade computing devices turn into piles of melted slag, most of the Internet Archive also becomes such a pile. Most of modern literature, music, podcasts, lectures, pictures, videos, and computer games disappear in a blink and slowly become vaguely remembered myths. Only printed books, paintings, microfilm copies, and vinyl records survive intact.

Meanwhile, on both sides of the globe, most payment processing infrastructures stops working for weeks, all devices and apps that call home stop working, essential services start failing because software that manages those services can’t confirm its licenses are still valid…

An apocalypse of our own making.

For example:

Another Carrington-like event happens, colloquially called The Melting.

Savvy data preservationists that had some spare hard drives in grounded Faraday cages and pirates that had BitTorrent seedboxes in underwater data centers start distributing surviving media via private BitTorrent trackers. Meanwhile, copyright title holders have no copies of the data they supposedly own. BitTorrent skyrockets in popularity astronomically as all commercial offerings are dead.

US copyright title holders lobby for cutting all surviving underwater data center installations from the Internet. They see this as their chance to kill piracy, at least for a while. But where can they get the data themselves?

Somebody has a bright idea, they lobby for the NSA to release all copies of the media they have in their Utah data center to the copyright title holders. NSA lies in front of Congress and denies they have any copies of anything, claiming The Melting event destroyed everything. Nobody believes them this time.

Meanwhile, the pirates start creating The Pirate Internet by connecting disconnected data centers with pirate underwater cables to Pirate Internet Exchanges.

The NSA, citing National Security concerns, mobilizes National Guard to defend the Utah data center from possible sabotage. The US population is confused at first, but then the copyright title holders start performing covert military operations against many underwater data center installations from which pirates seed their torrents. The objective, apparently, is to steal their archives for themselves. But most of those operations fail for reasons not disclosed to the public.

Data preservationists give interviews to the press on how copyright title holders privatized the profits while socializing the costs of data preservation and now they are using force to try and deprive humanity of what it managed to preserve. Copyright holders hold a press conference where they read copyright law by turns.

Tensions skyrocket. Well-organized militias start patrolling shorelines and waters near underwater data centers to let those works distribute to other surviving computers on the Internet.

Luckily for the US copyright title holders, a whistle-blower comes out and says that National Technical Information Service (NTIS), of all things, is hoarding lots of copyrighted data. Most people are confused, they did not know the US had such federal agency. It sparks a witch-hunt for other obscure federal assets that could have also preserved some of the data.

The savvy preservationists hidden among those federal agencies smuggle not-yet-BitTorrented media out. Copyright title holders catch some of them and try to charge them with CFAA. In retaliation, undercover data preservationists organize a sabotage and cracking campaign against copyright title holders’ new data centers and servers which now run vulnerable versions of open source software, since newer versions Melted and were not restored yet.

Copyright title holders claim this is “domestic terrorism”.

NSA learns about the Pirate Internet with its pirate cables, they want access to those cables too. The pirates tell them to go to hell. National Security concerns are cited, National Guard is mobilized again, this time to take over Pirate Internet Exchanges by force.

Copyright title holders are, of course, very happy about this and do their best to try and trump up the public support and lobby for outright destruction of Pirate Internet Exchanges and cables.

The initial exchange of force between National Guard and the owners of Pirate Internet Exchanges and armed citizens and militias that want their Pirate Internet to continue to work grows into a civil war.

The President declares Martial Law, it only makes things worse. The State of Florida, now run by pirates, declares independence…

Well, maybe that exact sequence of events is a bit unlikely, but the actual Solar flare event that would fry all surface consumer-grade electronics could happen at any moment.

Cybercrud introductions currently in progress

Google works on breaking the Web

Note that Google Chrome has some ridiculous market share at the moment. Simultaneously, Android’s Chrome now has WebView Integrity API, which is essentially a DRM scheme for the whole of HTML+CSS+JavaScript stack, not just video, like Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) spec was. It started as a more general Web Environment Integrity, but was scaled down to Android WebView after lots of push-back.

So for now they are letting the frog warm up a bit before the next boiling attempt.

If they push it through, anti-circumvention laws will start applying to large parts of the Web too. As the above shows, the result would be catastrophic.

Google works on breaking Android

Additionally, in August of 2025 Google announced that from September of 2026 they are going to start “protecting you from malware” by requiring all app developers get permission from Google to run their apps on Android devices running Google Services, regardless of the app store used for distribution, not just for apps distributed via Google Play Store.

That is, for example, any app from F-Droid Google dislikes they will be able to prevent from working on most Android devices, at will, at any moment.

I suspect they are doing this now because NewPipe and Grayjay became too popular.

But another effect of this will be that all currently working but unmaintained Android apps will become unrunnable.

Moreover, the abovementioned feature is also a technical access measure protected by Section 1201 and Article 6. This would mean that, after it gets implemented, sharing instructions for how one can work around it would, technically, become a felony. Jailbreaking your own devices would still be allowed under exceptions to DMCA Section 1201 until at least 2027, but telling others how to do it would not.

Course-correction strategies

Develop under a Ulysses pact

Let’s say you are starting a project that might eventually become or get sold to a public company. But you don’t want that public company’s shareholders to drown your intellectual baby in cybercrud and start abusing its users. What can you do?

Well, you can commit to never making a public company out of it or selling it to one. Obviously, shareholder primacy does not apply to individuals and private companies. In theory, problem solved. In practice, however, things could happen:

As Cory Doctorow points out, on developer/manufacturer side, the only known solution to this problem that is shown to work is to commit to a Ulysses pact by making project’s hardware unlocked from the start and publishing its software under a strong libre license, like GPLv3.

This is because GPLv3 explicitly forbids tivoization, i.e. use of GPLv3-licensed code on devices with digital locks. Technically, it does not prevent software’s copyright title holder (licensor) themselves from adding such locks to their code or devices, but if a project is licensed under GPLv3, it’s usually either forked from or uses other pieces of GPLv3-licensed code, which then does prevent tivoization.

Therefore, even if your projects becomes a public company, if your future shareholders ask you to close the source and add some evil into your project currently licensed under GPLv3, you could then rightfully point out that anyone could then fork the project from the latest libre-licensed revision, start using that, and then, maybe, start re-implementing any missing features the evil version has gained since, which is usually simpler and cheaper than doing that design work from scratch.

That is, this approach makes evil changes unprofitable, making shareholder primacy work for you.

Influence effectively

On the consumer side, the only solution to this kind of problem that was shown to work is to boycott and constantly publicly shame anything that anti-circumvention laws apply to in ways that causes their developers/manufacturers/publishers to lose profits.

This is how the Japanese managed to pressure their copyright title holders into allowing the doujinshi market to exist and then flourish. The same strategy could be applied to anti-circumvention laws.

Yes, it would be better if circumvention and sharing of circumvention recipes would simply become legal, the strategies for which shall be discussed below. But it would work just as well if a company adding digital locks to its products would cause immediate market share, reputation, and profit losses.

This would make “felony contempt of business model” approach of doing business infeasible because shareholder primacy would be working against it. For CEOs of such companies, an adage of “making evil changes causes an immediate sharp drop in market share and profits” must become common sense.

On the implementation side, if you are an influencer that writes or talks about these issues, you should be doing this in away that is hurtful for the evil developer/manufacturer/publisher in question but helpful for its (potentially, potential) consumers. In other words, when discussing evil products, don’t just criticize them and discuss their issues, advertise their competition too!

For example, Louis Rossmann sometimes ends his videos with clips in the vein of

“Hey, did you know that even the super-expensive premium flagship LG smart TVs spy on you and sell your personal data by default?”

This is an awesome way to go about it, but it would have been much better if that clip was followed up by an alternative recommendation, in the vein of:

“But look, instead, here’s a Korean monitor of similar size with an HDMI input for a third of LG’s price, here’s a Raspberry Pi, a wireless keyboard and mouse, and Kodi. Let me show you how easy to make it all work together.”

(A short clip showing how to download and flash Libreelec onto an SD card, plug it into a Raspberry Pi, then plug wireless keyboard and mouse into there, then attach that Raspberry Pi to a monitor via HDMI, and then boot it all.)

“Here’s how you install Kodi plugins.”

(A short clip showing how to watch YouTube videos on Kodi.)

“See, it takes less than an hour to set it all up and it saves you $2500. Does $2500 for an hour of your time sound reasonable? It will also save you more money in the future, because no evil company can abuse you now. You can save all the media you watch locally and archive it all forever, too. If you don’t like the keyboard/mouse thing, here’s a USB-HID joystick/gamepad you could use instead, or you could use this USB-HID TV-style remote instead. Though, personally, I like having a keyboard.”

It would be even better if influencers would publish such explanation snippets and video clips under very permissive licenses, like CC0. Those snippets and clips could then be simply copy-pasted into their media by other creators, without asking for permission.

Imagine: developer/manufacturer/publisher adds evil into their product, and instead of simply whining about it, the whole Internet tech influencer scene blows up and starts advertising their competition. Highly unprofitable! Shareholder primacy works for the people now.

Consume smartly

On a personal side, you can do as much as possible from the following list, in order of importance:

The above does not mean you should drop all apps and services you are currently using right this moment. But the next time they do something that pisses you off, employ the above strategies when searching for alternatives that are less likely to be corrupted in the future. Ignore their promises, popularity, or whatever. If their End-User Agreement says they can change it at any time, which almost all of them do, it’s all fake anyway.

Sure, how things currently stand, the above probably would not budge the tech monopolies much. But if small developers, manufacturers, and publishers won’t be able to do digital locks anymore, it would change the status quo from “everyone does this” to “only the evilest do this”, which would stain the practice in the public consciousness and would make it much easier to repeal Section 1201 and Article 6 — laws that only evil Big Tech and Media Giants would be benefiting from.

Lawful strategies

Now, let’s discuss some course-correction strategies of the collective/political kind.

Regulate Big Tech and/or break up Big Tech monopolies

Cory Doctorow points out that one way monopolies can do regulatory capture is simply lie to regulators and breaking them up should help with that.

Firstly, the resulting broken up companies can still collude. The US telecommunication companies Doctorow discusses in that article are very much the result of such a break, after all.

Secondly, this issue can also be solved by simply shoving more different people in front of regulators, so that Big Tech voices are not the only ones they hear. Which, in the US context, means pro-public lobbying, yes. So, respect to Louis Rossmann for that, I suppose.

But neither would help when the regulation is already captured by other means, which shall be discussed below.

Cory Doctorow argues that Big Tech needs to be regulated more/better and Big Tech monopolies need to be broken up so that the could not abuse their users and competition as much as they can today. It’s a common theme of his writings and talks, see this and that for something recent, to quote the essential argument from the first link:

There’s a great name for this: “scalesplaining.” As in “well, actually the platforms are doing an amazing job, but you can’t possibly understand that because you don’t work for them.” It’s weird enough when scalesplaining is used to condemn sensible regulation of the platforms; it’s even weirder when it’s weaponized to defend a system of regulatory protection for the platforms against would-be competitors.

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in government-protected monopolies. Somehow, scalesplaining can be used to condemn governments as incapable of making any tech regulations and to insist that regulations that protect tech monopolies are just perfect and shouldn’t ever be weakened. Truly, it’s impossible to get someone to understand something when the value of their employee stock options depends on them not understanding it.

Well, sure, I agree with that. However, business regulation is a rather two-sided problem.

Regulation of businesses

On the one hand, to extract higher profits, poorly regulated businesses tend to cut various corners and abuse their users, employees, and businesses partners, as their simple profit motives and shareholder primacy require of them. On the other hand, regulation tends to produce negative effects too. So, let’s discuss a couple of those effects relevant here.

Under regulatory capture

Note that under a corrupt political regime where regulatory capture has already happened, neither more regulation, nor less regulation, nor different regulation would actually improve anything.

If they are going to regulate, they are going to regulate in their captors’ favor, adding more directly beneficial pull-the-ladder-after-yourself stuff like CFAA and/or things that hurt them somewhat, but hurt their competition more, like KYC, name verification, age verification, content moderation filters, and similar.

If they are going to deregulate, they would obviously start with the pesky annoying stuff that makes captors’ businesses less profitable, like environmental protection, barriers to overexploitation of renewable resources, occupational safety and health regulations, financial regulations (whatever is left of them anywhere except Iceland), net neutrality, privacy protections (not that I’m aware of any good regulations on this, but still), restrictions on advertisement to children, restrictions on gambling, etc.

If they are going to increase taxes, they will tax everyone but the captors’ themselves more, and then will give those taxes as subsidies and/or government contracts to the captors.

If they are going to decrease taxes, they will cut those that the captors pay first.

Under regulatory loopholes

Note that it’s perfectly possible for regulation to become captured or skewed in favor of some businesses to the detriment of others without any corruption or monopolies whatsoever. The regulation in question could even be written by honest regulators with best of intentions, it simply needs to have loopholes that some businesses can exploit and others suffer from.

Regulators can then be persuaded to keep the loopholes as-is simply because trying to fix them would draw attention to and shame people who introduced them.

Or, when corruption is possible at later steps, those profits made with those loopholes can then be used for persuasion via direct bribes, campaign contributions, shares in affected companies, promises of comfortable revolving doors, etc. No monopolies are required for this step either, a whole industry can happily cooperate for this.

It seems to me that the abovementioned effects of copyright anti-circumvention laws were such a loophole, initially. Similarly, the overall state of EU tech regulation appears to have the same origin. Specifically, the EU managed to, essentially, regulate their own tech sector out of existence by introducing regulations that appear to be good on paper, but play right into US Big Tech’s hands.

Let’s remind ourselves of the GDPR disaster that forced those stupid annoying cookie banners on everyone, drove many web service operators out of the EU, and dropped website visits and revenue to those inside the EU. Meanwhile, note that GDPR was not really protecting anyone’s privacy anyway since device fingerprinting and “sufficiently anonymized” tracking data were excluded from the beginning. What GDPR considers to be “sufficiently anonymized” can usually be easily deanonymized by combining two “sufficiently anonymized” data sources.

In other words, under GDPR, Big Tech websites that used device/browser fingerprinting for tracking anonymous/logged-out users and have both the data and the compute to deanonymize their tracking data streams continued essentially unimpeded. Meanwhile, small websites that used simple user tracking methods for legitimate web mastering reasons now have to annoy their users by pestering them with cookie banners, thus driving them away to less-annoying Big Tech websites, or use more sophisticated user tracking technologies from third-parties, thus creating and propping up more tracking-focused Big Tech firms.

GDPR went into effect on May 25th of 2018. So, did web surveillance situation improved since? It got worse! GDPR simply created new tech businesses that help websites present GDPR-compliant cookie banners and collect their tracking data in GDPR-compliant ways. These new businesses then started to happily aggregate those “sufficiently anonymized” data streams from hundreds of websites and sell them to advertisement companies.

In other words, GDPR was created to improve tracking and surveillance situation for an average web user, but it made the average web user be tracked and surveyed more.

“GDPR was a disaster!”
“Oops! But have no fear! Digital Services Act will fix the loopholes!”
“But Apple—”
Digital Markets Act!”
“But AI—”
Artificial Intelligence Act will fix that!”
“Things only getting worse…”
Digital Fairness Act will fix it! Surely!”

“So, are you saying that all of this is entirely on purpose?”

Not at all. In case of GDPR, I could totally imagine they simply wrote the best regulation they could — most of things in GDPR sound very reasonable — but then some lobbyists pushed for a couple of reasonable-sounding exceptions, and voilà!

“Okay, we are now ready to take comments and questions from the industry. Anyone? Yes, Mr. Lobbyist in the third row.”
“Mr. Regulator, GDPR only really talks about HTTP cookies, does that mean that other web tracking technologies are excluded?”
“Mr. Lobbyist! Of course not! We are introducing GDPR to protect European web users from nefarious web tracking!”
“But without any tracking data, how would a website operator optimize its website? How would a company do market research?”
“Hmm, alright, let us confer on this.”
(Awhile later.)
“After much discussion we decided to add an exception for ‘sufficiently anonymized’ tracking data. Would that suffice?”
“How is ‘sufficiently anonymized’ defined?”
“With no personally identifiable information contained within.”
“So, device and web browser fingerprints would be excluded, then?”
“I do think we have heard some comments from the public about that yesterday…”
“It’s a technology that assigns what is essentially a random number to users’ devices. Those numbers are then used as IDs for tracking events.”
“So, no personally identifiable information gets recorded?”
(Smirking slightly.) “None. Unless the user supplies some themselves, of course.”
(A little uncertainly, Mr. Regulator looks to his colleagues, most of whom shrug.)
“That should be fine then.”
(Smiling creepily.) “I have no further questions.”
“Anyone else? I think Mrs. Lobbyist from the second row also had a question?”
(Smiling dishonestly.) “Ah, well, as Mr. Lobbyist pointed out, our clients would prefer something less restrictive than GDPR, but with the previous discussion, this appears to be an acceptable compromise.”
“I see. It’s decided, then. The law is strict, but it’s the law! Your clients would have to learn to live with it.”
(Smiling creepily, in tandem.) “ “So they will!” ”

Similarly, Artificial Intelligence Act was created as a sane regulatory tool against AI-safety threats. And yet, the resulting regulation explicitly excludes the most dangerous uses of AI, namely, military and AI research. I’m sorry, but, with those things excluded, what, exactly, is even the point of the rest of it?

“Are they continuing to do this on purpose?”

Well, to me it looks like the EU is perfectly happy with regulating its own tech sector out of existence while fining the US tech monopolies billions of dollars every year for violating the above laws. Because, bureaucratically-speaking, it’s much easier than tracking thousands their would-be competitors based in the EU. And reversely, the US Big Tech is perfectly happy with being regulated and fined this way since its regulates their EU competition out of existence. Those fines they pay every year are pennies in comparison to what they earn by abusing their EU customers. If that weren’t true, those Big Tech firms would have simply stopped serving EU customers and EU would have grown some alternatives since. And, to be fair, some smaller US tech companies did stop serving EU customers in 2018, and some competition for those did appear. None of Google, Meta/Facebook, Apple, or Amazon appear to be affected, however.

Antitrust

Having discussed business regulation in general, let’s now discuss antitrust laws in particular.

“Why do we even need antitrust laws?”

In theory, for a well-organized company, the more copies of each thing and more things that share manufacturing equipment and/or personnel it makes, the more cost-efficient its products and services are for a fixed quality. Which is just what economies of scale are about.

On the other hand, larger companies frequently drown themselves in bureaucracy and/or start dispersing responsibility until no one is responsible for anything, which makes their products less cost-efficient and of lower quality.

Additionally, usually, the bigger a company is, the less relative per-product taxes it pays. Under some systems of taxation, this is a result of the tax system itself. Under others, it’s because higher profits allow them to hire staff whose whole job is to do tax optimization, apply for government subsidies, tax cuts and etc. This also makes their products and services more cost-efficient.

So, in theory, in competitive markets, consumers benefit from all of the above effects since it creates a Hopf-like cycle: companies with better solutions to consumer’s problems grow larger and become more cost-efficient at solving them as they grow, which drowns them in bureaucracy and mismanagement, which makes them less cost-efficient and lowers quality of their solutions, which either forces them into fixing themselves, or creates competition.

However, in practice, many sufficiently large companies start practicing anti-competitive practices, regulatory capture, and outright tax evasion instead of fixing themselves or dying, which allows them to extinguish their competition and get more profits while being less efficient. Then, as soon as a corporation becomes an effective monopoly or monopsony, the temptation to start abusing their consumers or business partners for profit becomes just too high to resist (and, as noted above, literally illegal in many jurisdictions).

In other words, very large companies can break the above cycle and persist, dragging civilization back instead of helping. This is the reason that usually gets cited for why antitrust laws need to exist. Some authors also cite network effects as a reason to apply antitrust, usually in the vein of

“Network effects is what makes Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Twitter/TikTok/Telegram/etc hard to move away from so we need apply antitrust laws and force them into lowering the switching costs.”

“But do antitrust laws even work?”

Note, however, that it’s an open question whether antitrust laws even work as advertised and if their application actually improves things.

Firstly, as noted above, the efficacy of anything under regulatory capture is suspect. This, of course, also includes how antitrust law is being applied. Imagine: one monopoly sics/lobbies regulators to apply antitrust law to another monopoly so that the first monopoly could enter the market of the second.

Secondly, even when antitrust is applied competently and for honest reasons, one monopoly broken up might simply help another. For example, Microsoft getting hit with antitrust for having a monopoly on web browsers only lead to Google replacing them in that niche 10 years later, which then allowed Google to get bigger in the Internet market than Microsoft ever was.

Thirdly, when antitrust does get applied, companies are usually broken up by well-defined lines which exchange goods and services between each other. It’s just the most efficient way to increase tax revenue from the resulting split, which is actually the primary motivation governments pursue when splitting companies up. Therefore, if you are government, antitrust is helpful. But, as a consumer, you should probably be asking questions in the vein of “What is the probability that things will improve for me in the long run if company X is broken up?” And, so far, the track record of antitrust law applications, at least in the US, does not seem inspiring to me.

Finally, the argument that monopolies being broken up would break their network effects and force them into allowing more interoperation and would create a market with a bunch of interoperating competitors is naive.

Again, companies are usually broken up by well-defined lines. I don’t see why, say, Meta being split into Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram would help interoperability. After all, those services are not interoperable now, when they belong to the same company. In theory, regulators could break, say, Instagram into two so that half of the users would go to one shard and the rest to the other. But this is both technically infeasible and, as noted above, the government wouldn’t actually do this.

“But do antitrust laws hurt consumers?”

As noted above, products and services from larger companies are generally cheaper than their alternatives from smaller companies, even when their quality is better, because of the abovementioned economies of scale and taxation effects.

Note, however, that such consolidation also makes reverse engineering, software, alternative firmware, and hardware modification development easier, since engineers have to work with a smaller number of devices and programs.

Moreover, these effects are synergistic.

For example, this is why all of the best spec’ed and most affordable devices supported by Coreboot, GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and PostmarketOS are or were manufactured by very large companies.

Similarly, Louis Rossmann’s business exists exactly for the reason that, in the US, Apple devices are ubiquitous.

The same principle applies to other things, like, say, cars, where more popular models are cheaper to maintain.

The same principle applies to services. For example, this is how Facebook ate MySpace and why the more popular the service, the better its support in yt-dlp, gallery-dl, HPI, and similar.

Before GMail, most MUAs had to implement workarounds for many SMTP and IMAP servers. Today, everything has to interoperate with GMail, so most of those bugs were fixed. That is not to say that, in general, GMail’s monopoly on email is a good thing, but it did force all other email software things into interoperation.

When Internet Explorer was king, most websites were targeting that. Then, when that monopoly was broken up, most websites had to target a dozen of different browsers all at once, which was a nightmare. Today, most websites target Google Chrome, making web development and adversarial website modifications (like ad-blocking, userscripts, etc) much easier.

Meanwhile, open source software and hardware projects that do not require any code, services, devices, or parts produced by very large corporations are rare, and those that do exist lag decades behind their monopolistic competition (or refuse to do similar things at all).

In general, for a given product, quality of support by third-parties is directly proportional to the number of users. I.e., a positive network effect. The issue, of course, is that such power corrupts, which produces a negative network effect.

Therefore, an equivalent of the abovementioned competitive market cycle happens for the network effect too. Except, it’s much faster since most normal market competition effects are near-linear and the network effect is quadratic. Therefore, a company that depends on its network effect can vanish into nothing or become irrelevant rather quickly.

Copyright and anti-circumvention laws play the same role for the network effect cycle as regular regulatory capture plays for the competitive market cycle in that they can help a large company to persist despite being both hated and inefficient.

In other words, when copyright and anti-circumvention laws do not exist or do not apply, a tech monopoly that depends on network effects only needs to misstep once or twice to become irrelevant.

Additionally, artificially breaking up a monopoly in the middle of its network effect cycle could actually make things worse for consumers.

For example, if a Big Tech company that produces popular devices (e.g., Google with its Pixel phones) for which good alternative firmwares exist (e.g., GrapheneOS) is broken up and its shards all start producing their own devices, the resulting state could actually be worse than it was before. This planet does not have enough people that can do reverse-engineering as it is.

Takeaways

To reiterate the above, when anti-circumvention laws do not exist or do not apply and adversarial interoperability is possible, network effects actually play in consumer’s favor since they simply grow the pool of potential developers of circumvention tools and methods. Therefore, to fix all of the abovementioned issues anti-circumvention laws should be repealed first and foremost. (And a general copyright law reform applied second.)

Whether any additional regulation or antitrust would be needed if anti-circumvention laws are repealed and copyright reform is applied is highly questionable.

For instance, EU’s Digital Markets Act and Epic Games v. Apple in the US are lauded as big victories. But neither would have been needed if anti-circumvention laws did not exist!

On how to actually do that, firstly, one must acknowledge and internalize the fact that under regulatory capture, all non-specific political demands lead to doom and, therefore, it’s irresponsible to use generic tribal slogans on these issues, be they politically left or right. So, neither “Regulate!” nor “Deregulate!” slogans should be used. Instead, demands should be very specific.

In the US:

In the EU:

Outside of anti-circumvention laws being evil, personally, as a consumer, I am mostly agnostic on “Regulate!” versus “Deregulate!” issue. As noted above, both ways could work in theory, the issue is that with shareholder primacy applied, only the “Regulate!” path is feasible at the moment, which implies that only very large companies would be able to do anything of value. If the shareholder primacy issue was fixed, then “Deregulate!” path would also become feasible, which would make more things being done by smaller companies feasible.

On the other hand, in regards to privacy laws, I honestly don’t know how one can fix modern rampant privacy issues by adding more regulation. Any reasonably strong privacy law I can come up with also makes many legitimate use-cases illegal.

I think making adversarial interoperability legal would eliminate most of privacy abuses simply by creating better alternatives and making those abuses unprofitable. After which GDPR can be cut down to its bare and sane basics, like the parts that regulate companies to disclose what data they collect and why, and how any data leaks should be disclosed and such.

Make other WIPO signatories abandon anti-circumvention laws

As Cory Doctorow points out, many WTO members and WIPO signatories signed those treaties under a promise of no to very low tariffs with the US. Therefore, the argument goes, since new US tariffs introduced by Donald Trump, at least some of them could probably be persuaded to abandon it.

Okay, let’s say some countries abandon WTO and WIPO. Now what? They still wouldn’t be able to sell anything WIPO forbids to most other countries, since WIPO is written in such a way that a country neither can make nor import forbidden things. So, this would only work if most of WIPO signatories abandon it all at once. Additionally, even then, most of the potential users for those circumvention products and services live in the US.

On the other hand, as soon as a single country starts talking about this, the US can start retaliating with more tariffs and sanctions.

On yet another hand, countries that are under lots of tariffs and sanctions already could, in theory, start working on systematically circumventing everything US manufactures. But then, the question is, would it actually help those countries? Paradoxically, circumvented products usually get more popular as a result, so, who would benefit in case where all created circumventions could only be distributed freely and not sold?

So, realpolitik-ally, this seems unlikely to me.

A cache of circumvention solutions

In contrast, Louis Rossmann’s idea is to assemble a cache of circumvention solutions for a large number of devices, without releasing any of them, and then use that cache as an argument in lobbying to repeal DMCA Section 1201 in the vein of

“Mr. Congressman, the original purpose of that section did not work out. But if you repeal that law today, then tomorrow millions of devices costing billions of dollars, which are just high-tech garbage at the moment, will be able to work properly again. Your constituents will be very thankful.”

It’s a clever exploit which turns unconditional bans on sharing copyright anti-circumvention methods into a weapon for lobbying.

I see several possible issues:

Litigate against evil developers/manufacturers for software licensing violations

Another possible approach I did not see discussed in this context before is as follows.

Software Freedom Law Center, Software Freedom Conservancy, and some others are dabbling in litigation against companies that violate free software licenses on behalf on code copyright title holders and then settling for license compliance and/or some money.

I would be very surprised if none of the digitally locked devices use any code that is licensed under GPLv3. Meanwhile, GPLv3 explicitly forbids tivoization, which is what all devices that fall under Section 1201 and Article 6.

Additionally, the abovementioned list of exceptions allows breaking of digital locks for software licensing investigation reasons (which was lobbied-in by the abovementioned organizations, which is nice of them).

Therefore, the circumvention cache effort can be combined with an effort to break those locks for software licensing investigation purposes, which would also increase the scope of devices that can be broken legally.

Even if those devices do not use any code under GPLv3, in reality, many software projects use licenses that are incompatible with each other. Usually, none of the code authors care when both sides of such a relationship use sufficiently open licenses. However, you can probably convince some copyright title holders on code in those projects to play ball with litigation against evil developers/manufacturers that abuse their users, especially if you offload all relevant legal work from them in an organized fashion.

You can then sue those developers/manufacturers to either give you more than their profits as copyright violation damages (the Copyright Act and the DMCA are draconian, turnabout is fair play) or be reasonable about it and settle for little to no money if they release firmware updates to all of their devices that remove all digital locks and commit to never adding any digital locks to any of their products in the future, ever. (Though, the exact language of that commitment should be discussed carefully.)

Chaotic strategies

Break ineffective locks

Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. case (also, this) seems to imply that if you work around a digital lock without actually touching it, that lock does not count as an “effective technological measure” under Section 1201 and Article 6.

So, for example, it appears that exploits that rely on developers/manufacturers failing at cryptography and some MITM attacks do not count. See, for example, Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii cracks, also their math details.

Though, companies will probably try to litigate against any such public workarounds anyway, so this strategy is both risky and expensive.

Resell devices with broken locks

To me it seems that Section 1201 and Article 6 also allow for the following workaround:

If the resulting device is self-contained and does not depend on manufacturer’s rental services, then a manufacturer that dislikes the above shall come against the first-sale doctrine.

The exact details of what is and is not permitted are a bit tricky, see the discussion in the above article, and I’m sure some will try to sue anyway.

But if you are willing to litigate, I’m pretty sure this can be made into a profitable business: apply the above process to cheap household devices that are sold under cost with expectation that the difference will later be taken from subscriptions on functions that are built-in into the device, remove those subscriptions, and sell the result for price plus ~3–10 years of subscription (depending on device type) or some such.

Emulate Sci-Hub

Finally, there’s a curious fact you are not supposed to point out, which is that it was Sci-Hub who forced academic publishing into open access, not the US government.

At one point Sci-Hub had over 95% of everything with a DOI number archived and its stats showed that most scientists used Sci-Hub regardless of what anyone else claimed. This level of piracy forced most scientific journals to simply start publishing most things as open access or become irrelevant. Only then, that and the prosecution of Aaron Swartz made the White House Public Access Directive happen, thus making open access publishing a requirement for a lot of public-funded research.

It wouldn’t have happened without Sci-Hub.

For the scientific publishers, before Sci-Hub, the situation looked something in the vein of

“Open Access? Thanks, but no thanks. We want to continue as normal socializing the costs of peer review but privatizing the profits of everything else.”
“But the scientists and the public want science to be in open access.”
“And we want private yachts.”
“Which is why some scientists are organizing their own journals now.”
“Whatever, we can simply lobby for those to be excluded from considerations when governments decide on where to send grant money. Problem solved.”

but after Sci-Hub, it started looking increasingly like

“AAAAAH! Sci-Hub has everything we do, and more, all scientists are using Sci-Hub, the public is using Sci-Hub, libraries stopped paying for our subscriptions and also use Sci-Hub, we might become completely irrelevant very soon!”

and so, suddenly,

“Ah, yes, we heard you wanted Open Access? It’s an acceptable compromise! Please, just let us live!”

happened.

Similarly, hypothetically speaking, imagine there being a software package that could be installed onto Raspberry Pi, Flipper Zero, or any other similar generic single-board computer with a GPIO interface. It has a menu with all the devices it is able to circumvent. The user selects the name of their device from the menu, it tells them how to open their device and connect a GPIO ribbon cable there. They do that and press “Start”. A minute later their device is re-flashed with a cracked version of the firmware that removes device’s manufacturer from the picture completely, unlocking all the features and removing all artificial limits placed there for market segmentation.

Suddenly, for a manufacturer, not being completely evil in return for having at least some control over what users do with those devices seems like an acceptable compromise.

Of course, under Section 1201 and Article 6 this would be very illegal, but Sci-Hub is too. Of course, open hardware is better, but this is better than nothing.


  1. Grid Compass most certainly counts as a laptop, but, personally, I would argue that Micral Portal is a portable desktop PC instead.↩︎

  2. Though, on the middle two points, there’s some self-fulfilling prophesy dynamic there, since, for example, Tim Berners-Lee was explicitly inspired by Nelson’s writings and even borrowed “hypertext” term straight from him.↩︎

  3. I refuse to call them “owners”, you can’t “own” bits.↩︎

  4. In fact, the scientific argument of whether piracy actually lowers or increases profits, by the nature of less legitimate first-order sales versus more visibility causing more second-order sales, is still ongoing.

    The fact that it’s ongoing for most of my life suggests to me that it’s probably both.

    My guess of the overall effect would be as follows:

    • It probably harms sales of popular media and helps sales of the obscure.
    • Simultaneously, it probably helps sales of things that you would want to watch or listen to with somebody else, read to your child, or give as a present, and harms sales of consume-and-forget slop.

    In fact, the book I bought the most copies of ever is The Selfish Gene, because there was a time when it was my favorite present for every happy occasion. And I did, in fact, read it in full before buying my first copy.↩︎