Supporters of copyright reform are hoping that 2013 is the year they get some real momentum going. In the wake of Monday's news that the White House and FCC now support consumers' rights to unlock their cell phones, a new coalition called has launched an effort to repeal the section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that forbids breaking "digital locks."
The group has a website called FixTheDMCA.org, which lays out the problem in a simple, graphical way, and provides tools for people to contact their Congressional representatives. The group's goal is to build support for a repeal of section 1201 of the DMCA, the so-called "anti-circumvention" clause.
That won't be an easy task, since the entertainment industry has fought hard to make digital lock-breaking illegal. When creating DVD copy-protection, for instance, the industry was keen to make sure that getting around such technology would be illegal. This proposal goes further than some others, such as a bill introduced yesterday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) aimed specifically at unlocking cell phones.
The page highlights some of the more quixotic and outrageous realities of the state of "digital locks" today: unlocking a cell phone to run on another carrier could make you the subject of a federal lawsuit. "Jailbreaking" to run unauthorized software is allowed for cell phones, but not for tablets or game consoles. And blind people have to petition the Library of Congress every three years to make sure they continue to have legal access to screen-reading software for e-books.
Sina Khanifar, who created the petition pushing the White House to support cell-phone unlocking, sent out an e-mail announcing the new group. He also noted that there's no equivalent of the "We The People" petition site meant to reach out to the legislative branch—something that he and his team are working to fix. They created a "placeholder site" at grassroots.io, built over the course of a 72 hour bus ride from San Francisco to Austin that featured "limited Internet connectivity [and] a total of about 10 hours of sleep."
Supporters of the new project are listed on the FixTheDMCA site; they include YCombinator, Reddit, Mozilla, O'Reilly Media, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, the Internet Archive, IFixit, and a few dozen small software companies.
"At Make magazine, we long have had a slogan—if you can't open it, you don't own it," said Tim O'Reilly, announcing his support of the new project in a press release. "When you can't take something apart, you can't understand it. When it breaks, you can't fix it. When you want it to do something more, you can't modify it. Section 1201 of the DMCA not only takes away critical rights from owners of consumer electronics, it flies in the face of our national priority to improve STEM education and engineering literacy."
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