A brief thought about the recent news

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the US government over ‘unconstitutional’ use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
article by Cory Doctorow

We are finally approaching the day when we will have to rethink copyright and how to enforce it. The Cyberworld is leaking into the real one and we are submerged by a very strange business. The printer cartridge business model has been replicated in the coffee, automotive, domestic appliance industry because of a glitch in the law.

Copyrighted software is inside some of this products and hence inspecting it violates the copyright.

What is brilliant in this scheme is that the only software inside this product is the Digital Right Managements Software. A cartridge can be innovative in shape or materials and those can be patented (a patent limited to the cartridge industry) but software is malleable, write it once and ship it everywhere, inside anything.

This lead to having a product that can’t be inspected because inspecting the DRM software is a felony, violates the copyright on the software, the one that should be defended by the very same software.

Clearly someone was paying attention when the concept of Recursion was explained.