The internet of things, End User License Agreements, and Digital Rights Management are increasingly being used to give electronics manufacturers control and ownership over your stuff even after you buy it. Radio Motherboard talks to Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, authors of The End of Ownership about what we stand to lose when our songs, movies, tractors, and even our coffee makers serve another master.

From the book’s website

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don’t own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn’t. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property.

Of course, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.

Read more here.

Photo by Sean MacEntee

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Cory Doctorow: In July, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium overruled dozens of members’ objections to publishing a DRM standard without a compromise to protect accessibility, security research, archiving, and competition.

EFF appealed the decision, the first-ever appeal in W3C history, which concluded last week with a deeply divided membership. 58.4% of the group voted to go on with publication, and the W3C did so today, an unprecedented move in a body that has always operated on consensus and compromise. In their public statements about the standard, the W3C executive repeatedly said that they didn’t think the DRM advocates would be willing to compromise, and in the absence of such willingness, the exec have given them everything they demanded.

This is a bad day for the W3C: it’s the day it publishes a standard designed to control, rather than empower, web users. That standard that was explicitly published without any protections — even the most minimal compromise was rejected without discussion, an intransigence that the W3C leadership tacitly approved. It’s the day that the W3C changed its process to reward stonewalling over compromise, provided those doing the stonewalling are the biggest corporations in the consortium.

EFF no longer believes that the W3C process is suited to defending the open web. We have resigned from the Consortium, effective today. Below is our resignation letter:

Dear Jeff, Tim, and colleagues,

In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem. By doing so, the organization offered the use of its patent pool, its staff support, and its moral authority to the idea that browsers can and should be designed to cede control over key aspects from users to remote parties.

When it became clear, following our formal objection, that the W3C’s largest corporate members and leadership were wedded to this project despite strong discontent from within the W3C membership and staff, their most important partners, and other supporters of the open Web, we proposed a compromise. We agreed to stand down regarding the EME standard, provided that the W3C extend its existing IPR policies to deter members from using DRM laws in connection with the EME (such as Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act or European national implementations of Article 6 of the EUCD) except in combination with another cause of action.

This covenant would allow the W3C’s large corporate members to enforce their copyrights. Indeed, it kept intact every legal right to which entertainment companies, DRM vendors, and their business partners can otherwise lay claim. The compromise merely restricted their ability to use the W3C’s DRM to shut down legitimate activities, like research and modifications, that required circumvention of DRM. It would signal to the world that the W3C wanted to make a difference in how DRM was enforced: that it would use its authority to draw a line between the acceptability of DRM as an optional technology, as opposed to an excuse to undermine legitimate research and innovation.

More directly, such a covenant would have helped protect the key stakeholders, present and future, who both depend on the openness of the Web, and who actively work to protect its safety and universality. It would offer some legal clarity for those who bypass DRM to engage in security research to find defects that would endanger billions of web users; or who automate the creation of enhanced, accessible video for people with disabilities; or who archive the Web for posterity. It would help protect new market entrants intent on creating competitive, innovative products, unimagined by the vendors locking down web video.

Despite the support of W3C members from many sectors, the leadership of the W3C rejected this compromise. The W3C leadership countered with proposals — like the chartering of a nonbinding discussion group on the policy questions that was not scheduled to report in until long after the EME ship had sailed — that would have still left researchers, governments, archives, security experts unprotected.

The W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus. Nevertheless, as the coalition in support of a DRM compromise grew and grew — and the large corporate members continued to reject any meaningful compromise — the W3C leadership persisted in treating EME as topic that could be decided by one side of the debate. In essence, a core of EME proponents was able to impose its will on the Consortium, over the wishes of a sizeable group of objectors — and every person who uses the web. The Director decided to personally override every single objection raised by the members, articulating several benefits that EME offered over the DRM that HTML5 had made impossible.

But those very benefits (such as improvements to accessibility and privacy) depend on the public being able to exercise rights they lose under DRM law — which meant that without the compromise the Director was overriding, none of those benefits could be realized, either. That rejection prompted the first appeal against the Director in W3C history.

In our campaigning on this issue, we have spoken to many, many members’ representatives who privately confided their belief that the EME was a terrible idea (generally they used stronger language) and their sincere desire that their employer wasn’t on the wrong side of this issue. This is unsurprising. You have to search long and hard to find an independent technologist who believes that DRM is possible, let alone a good idea. Yet, somewhere along the way, the business values of those outside the web got important enough, and the values of technologists who built it got disposable enough, that even the wise elders who make our standards voted for something they know to be a fool’s errand.

We believe they will regret that choice. Today, the W3C bequeaths an legally unauditable attack-surface to browsers used by billions of people. They give media companies the power to sue or intimidate away those who might re-purpose video for people with disabilities. They side against the archivists who are scrambling to preserve the public record of our era. The W3C process has been abused by companies that made their fortunes by upsetting the established order, and now, thanks to EME, they’ll be able to ensure no one ever subjects them to the same innovative pressures.

So we’ll keep fighting to fight to keep the web free and open. We’ll keep suing the US government to overturn the laws that make DRM so toxic, and we’ll keep bringing that fight to the world’s legislatures that are being misled by the US Trade Representative to instigate local equivalents to America’s legal mistakes.

We will renew our work to battle the media companies that fail to adapt videos for accessibility purposes, even though the W3C squandered the perfect moment to exact a promise to protect those who are doing that work for them.

We will defend those who are put in harm’s way for blowing the whistle on defects in EME implementations.

It is a tragedy that we will be doing that without our friends at the W3C, and with the world believing that the pioneers and creators of the web no longer care about these matters.

Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C.

Thank you,

Cory Doctorow
Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Photo by Intrepidteacher

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As reported by Jason Koebler in Vice Motherboard, lots of American farmers frustrated by John Deere’s licensing terms are now turning to Ukrainian and Polish hackers to buy software fixes. They want to be able to fix and modify their own legally purchased tractors. (“Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors with Ukrainian Firmware,” March 21, 2017.)

This very type of problem inspired hacker Richard Stallman to invent free software in the late 1970s. When an experimental laser printer donated to MIT by the Xerox Corporation kept jamming, Stallman tried to develop a software fix so he could help everyone who used the printer. He quickly discovered that the source code for the machine was proprietary — a stupid, self-serving limitation that prevented him from helping his colleagues.

This sort of copyright control has frequently crippled machinery over the decades. The basic point is to protect a company’s market power and proprietary control — a form of power usually protected by law.  Under US law, for example, bypassing “digital rights management,” or DRM, systems on DVDs, CDs or websites is against the law.

In the case of land vehicles such as tractors, a legal exception was carved out under US copyright law in 2015. But John Deere was able to evade that provision by requiring farmers to sign a new licensing agreement when they buy a tractor.  The license prohibits “nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevent[s] farmers from suing for ‘crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software,’” Koelber writes.

Most computer users have become accustomed to the annoying End User Licensing Agreements, or EULAs, which most people click-through and ignore.  (Are you actually going to read through 15 pages of legalese or hire an attorney to re-negotiate the license?)  The EULAs are essentially “contracts of adhesion” – one-sided agreements drafted by sellers to give them greater control over how their product may be used after its purchase and to limit sellers’ legal liability.  Contracts of adhesion purport to be freely made agreements between seller and buyer, but of course, they are nothing of the sort.  They are highly complex pseudo-contracts that reflect only the interests of the seller, which uses its raw market power or technological dominance to foist ridiculous terms on hapless consumers.

So if it’s harvest time and your tractor doesn’t work, the license insists that only an authorized John Deere dealership can fix or modify your tractor.  And if company technicians aren’t available, or 50 miles away, you’re out of luck.  Some farmers fear that the license gives John Deere so much legal authority that it could remotely shut down their tractors that have violated the license agreement.

The Vice Motherboard article describes a movement among farmers to push for “right to repair” legislation:

“If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. “You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”

“What you’ve got is technicians running around here with cracked Ukrainian John Deere software that they bought off the black market,” he added.

Kenney and [Nebraska hog farmer] Kluthe have been pushing for right-to-repair legislation in Nebraska that would invalidate John Deere’s license agreement (seven other states are considering similar bills). In the meantime, farmers have started hacking their machines because even simple repairs are made impossible by the embedded software within the tractor. John Deere is one of the staunchest opponents of this legislation.

The John Deere EULA is just another example of how corporate players are making commoning illegal.  Code can’t be shared; it must be monopolized and monetized.  Farmer Kluthe has modified his John Deere to run on methane derived from pig manure, but it likely violates the EULA.  Richard Stallman would understand the frustration.

Although right-to-repair legislation would be a significant advance, I recently ran across another option:  an open source tractor.  The Oggún Tractor, completely open source but for its drive train, was introduced in November 2016 by an Alabama-based company called CleBer.  The Oggún Tractor — a fairly basic tractor that is intended for small-scale and family farms – sells for $12,500.

One of the founders is Horace Clemmons, who, as a veteran of the US computer industry, understands the value of open standards and open source development.  CleBer eplains that its business model is motivated by

“the fact that 80% of the world’s farmers can’t afford a tractor. Open System Manufacturing (OSM) changes that by being a customer based business model, not a stockholder based business model.

Open System Manufacturing is grounded in the idea that farm technology can advance more rapidly than it does today and get cheaper every year. While farmers do not currently see this reality for their tools, nearly everyone has seen this reality in the form of cell phone technology that becomes more useful and affordable every year. We have seen these benefits because of Open System Software and Computing. Why not apply the same concept to farm equipment?”

As an open source tractor, the Oggún uses common, off-the-shelf parts; uses the same components and subcomponents in multiple pieces of equipment; uses locally sourced parts, where possible; uses simplistic designs that allow the user to make unique adaptation and modifications.

“Our goal is to provide an affordable foundation that allows the people closest to the problems to innovate unique solutions that work for them and their community,” says the company literature.  “It’s not just a tractor, ‘it’s a way of thinking.’” Part of the thinking behind the Oggún tractor is to help revive make local and regional farming at smaller scales.  The low-cost, open source tractor should be especially attractive to farmers in the global South.

There are, of course, other open source agricultural equipment projects such as Open Source Ecology and Farm Hack. However, a difficult problem with those projects is how to capitalize the designs and make them commercially available.  It’s hard to get capital for projects that don’t own intellectual property (i.e., a patent in a proprietary technology). CleBer seems to have solved that through the mission-oriented investments of its two founders, who want to revive small-scale farming in the US, Cuba and elsewhere.

The Oggún tractor is still a very new tractor and one aimed at a very specific market segment of farmers. Still, the fact that it exists at all as a commercial enterprise is remarkable – and its potential, if taken to different levels, could be amazing. There are a lot of owners of John Deere equipment who would surely prefer not to be buying illegal software from eastern European pirates, but helping to build a new, more innovative ecosystem of open source alternatives.

The post Encrypted Tractors – and the Open Source Solution appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This would amount to obliterating the “DRM Curtain” model of capitalism in the information field — a system of economic extraction and class rule comparable to the system of bureaucratic privilege in the old Soviet Union in its reliance on suppressing the free flow of information. It would put an end to the centerpieces of copyright culture today — DMCA takedowns, “three strikes” laws cutting off ISP services to illegal downloaders, and domain seizures of file-sharing sites.

But as Cory Doctorow points out (Courtney Nash, “Cory Doctorow on legally disabling DRM (for good),” O’Reilly Media, Aug. 17), this won’t just destroy the draconian legal regime in what’s conventionally regarded as information industries — music, movies, software, etc. — but increasingly prevalent use of copyrighted software to enforce proprietary designs and business models for physical goods. This includes limiting appliances to proprietary replacement parts and accessories (like printer cartridges), by DRMing the appliances to reject replacement parts that don’t pass an “integrity check” that verifies they come from the manufacturer.

“This is a live issue in a lot of domains. It’s in insulin pumps, it’s in voting machines, it’s in tractors…. Several security researchers filed a brief saying they had discovered grave defects in products as varied as voting machines, insulin pumps and cars, and they were told by their counsel that they couldn’t disclose because, in so doing, they would reveal information that might help someone bypass DRM, and thus would face felony prosecution and civil lawsuits.”

In short, eliminating the legal enforcement of DRM — by criminal, mind, not civil law — would effectively destroy all business models based on proprietary digital information, both in the “information industries” as such and in manufacturing. And these are, mind you, the primary source of profit in today’s global corporate economy.

Interestingly enough, thinkers like Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig say they’re not against copyright — they just want to reform it and make it more reasonable. But from what we’ve seen above, it’s absolutely dependent on police state measures like the DMCA and the “intellectual property” provisions in “Free Trade” Agreements like TPP for its survival in any remotely recognizable form.

That’s not to say copyright would cease to exist or be enforceable in any form. But what would be left of it, absent DMCA takedowns and criminal prosecution for file-sharing, would be the quaint world of copyright in the 1970s. The main material effect of copyright law would be to prevent the mass printing of unauthorized versions of copyrighted books, or of hard copies of recordings for sale in stores. And that would be far less significant for readers and listeners than it was back in the ’70s, when the inconvenient or poor quality output of photocopiers and casette recorders was the main threat to the publishing and record industries. Back in those days, the relative significance of copyright as a mechanism for rent extraction was relatively marginal, compared to capitalism’s other sources of profit.

The model of proprietary digital capitalism we’re familiar with — the central model of global corporate rent extraction — is absolutely dependent on police state measures like criminalizing the circumvention of DRM, the takedown (without due process of any kind) of allegedly infringing content online, and government seizure of Internet domains and web hosting servers without due process. Without them, it would simply collapse.

But fortunately, that model of capitalism is doomed regardless of the outcome of EFF’s lawsuit (and I wish it well!). Even as it is, circumvention technologies have advanced so rapidly that DRM-cracked versions of new movies and songs typically show up on torrent sites the same day they’re released, and Millennials accept it file-sharing as a simple fact of life. This culture of circumvention is now spreading into academic publishing with SciHub. How long before it spreads to proprietary spare parts and diagnostic software?

As always, as Center for a Stateless Society comrade Charles Johnson says (“Counter-Economic optimism,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, Feb. 7, 2009), an ounce of circumvention is worth a pound of lobbying.

Photo by Martin Krzywinski

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