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their printer cartridges contain copyrighted works — software
that trips an “I am empty” flag when the toner runs out, and have
sued a competitor who made a remanufactured cartridge that
reset the flag. Even garage-door opener companies have gotten in
on the act, claiming that their receivers’ firmware are copyrighted
works. Copyrighted cars, print carts, and garage-door openers:
What’s next, copyrighted light-fixtures?
Even in the context of legitimate — excuse me, “traditional”
— copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is
bad news. Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and
their assignees some rights, but it also reserves some rights to
the public. For example, an author has no right to prohibit anyone
from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the blind.
More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say over
what you can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If I buy your
book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It’s my prop-
erty. Not my “intellectual property” — a whacky kind of pseudo-
property that’s Swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements, and
limitations — but real, no-fooling, actual tangible
property
— the
kind of thing that courts have been managing through property
law for centuries.
But anticircumvention lets rightsholders invent new and ex-
citing copyrights for themselves — to write private laws without
accountability or deliberation — that expropriate your interest in
your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an
example of this: there’s no copyright here or in anywhere I know
of that says that an author should be able to control where you
enjoy her creative works, once you’ve paid for them. I can buy a
book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto
to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am; I can even buy books in
America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an
exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them
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