A garage door opener company named Chamberlain sued another company, Skylink, for making generic garage door openers that were backwards-compatible with the “copyrighted” garage door opener microcode. The court seems less than swayed that this is a violation of the DMCA:
Chamberlain’s proposed construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses even in the absence of any feared foul use. It would therefore allow any copyright owner, through a combination of contractual terms and technological measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual copyrighted work-or even selected copies of that copyrighted work. Again, this implication contradicts § 1201(c)(1) directly. Copyright law itself authorizes the public to make certain uses of copyrighted materials. Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software. What the law authorizes, Chamberlain cannot revoke.
[…] In a similar vein, Chamberlain’s proposed construction would allow any manufacturer of any product to add a single copyrighted sentence or software fragment to its product, wrap the copyrighted material in a trivial “encryption” scheme, and thereby gain the right to restrict consumers’ rights to use its products in conjunction with competing products. In other words, Chamberlain’s construction of the DMCA would allow virtually any company to attempt to leverage its sales into aftermarket monopolies — a practice that both the antitrust laws, see Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Tech. Servs., 504 U.S. 451, 455 (1992), and the doctrine of copyright misuse, Assessment Techs. of WI, LLC v. WIREdata, Inc., 350 F.3d 640, 647 (7th Cir. 2003), normally prohibit.
Slowly, but surely, this beast is getting reined in.
(via BoingBoing)
There is a PDF version of the entire Chamberlain vs Skylink case at http://www.aclickawayremotes.com they also have it in text format if you don’t want to download the pdf file. Lots of great information and FAQS are on that site.
Hmmmmm … comment spam, or link to a useful, on-topic resource? I’ll allow it, for the moment.