#dmca1201 — Public Fediverse posts

"Huh, the law thinks they can do age verification on me? Hmphf, I'll simply just bypass it by-" no, stop it.

You're using the wrong messaging. Your ability to bypass age verification is going to be exactly the same as your ability to bypass DRM software -- that is to say, incredibly easy from a technical level, but functionally impossible when you are placed into a society where the laws of the land mean that your access to *tools* and *information* on doing such a thing are heavily restricted.

You're doing bad messaging when you act like we're going to just nerd our ways out of this.

If age verification is actually passed as the law of the land, they're not going to stop with the first most sloppy implementation of it. Once a loophole has been discovered it's going to get patched.

Hacker types might be able to circumvent the simple version of Age Verification, but as the AI-bros say, "this is the worst version of this technology that is ever going to exist". What are we going to do when Age Verification gets tied to DRM software or Secure Enclave attestation stuff?

What do we do when it's a crime to host any of the software required to circumvent these -- leading to all the mirrors not hosting the software, so it's not available from Linux official repos?

Don't act like it's going to be easy to circumvent -- they're going to make sure to it that it won't be.

#AgeVerification #DRM #DMCA1201 #freedom #linux

The US government thumbs the scales against you, creating a regime that #JayFreeman aptly dubbed #FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/

All kinds of companies have availed themselves of this government-backed superpower. There's #DRM - digital locks, covered by #DMCA1201 - in powered #wheelchairs:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

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Shredding parts and cooking up bogus trademark claims is just for starters, though. For Apple, the true anti-repair innovation comes from the most pernicious US tech law: #Section1201 of the #DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct (#DMCA).

#DMCA1201 is an #AntiCircumvention law. It bans the distribution of any tool that bypasses "an effective means of access control."

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To invoke #DMCA1201, a company must first add the thinnest skin of #DigitalRightsManagement to their product. Since 1201 makes removing #DRM illegal, a company can use this molecule-thick scrim of DRM to felonize any activity that the DRM prevents.

More than 20 years ago, technologists started to tinker with ways to combine the legal and technical to tame the wild general purpose computer.

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It was also an astonishingly stupid claim to make to *me*, a career activist with 20 years experience fighting #DMCA1201, a decades-old professional affiliation with @eff, and a giant megaphone:

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/11/flipping-the-bird.html

But Bird was palpably desperate to keep its bezzle going, and Kwak - an employment lawyer with undeniable deficits in her understanding of copyright and cyber-law - was their champion

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Like all DRM, VIN locks are covered by Section 1201 of the #DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct (#DMCA), a 1998 law that criminalizes distributing tools to bypass "access controls," even if you do so for a lawful purpose (say, to fix your own tractor using a part you paid for). Violations of #DMCA1201 carry a penalty of 5 years in prison and a $500k fine - for a first offense.

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