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What does this have to do with copyright protection?What does this have to do with copyright protection?Posted Sep 12, 2003 0:41 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)Parent article: The Chamberlain v. Skylink DMCA ruling What really makes this an interesting DMCA case is that most people understand the DMCA to have to something to do with protecting copyrights -- stopping people from making copies and the like without the permission of the copyright owner. Here, there's no allegation that anyone is copying the Chamberlain garage door opener software, or doing anything else to it that Chamberlain would have a right to stop under copyright law. The allegation is that a user of the Skylink transmitter is "accessing" the GDO software by causing it to open the garage door. Since when does my copyright on a program give me the right to stop you from causing a legitimate copy of it to execute? With a codeless GDO, Chamberlain can't sue you for copyright infringement if you open somebody else's garage. So how come circumventing a device that's meant to stop people from opening other people's garages is a DMCA violation? Oddly, though, the DMCA has been found to protect just that kind of "access." The judge in this case cites the Lexmark case where a toner cartridge manufacturer hacked the mechanism in the printer that makes it refuse to print when you use a non-Lexmark toner cartridge. By causing the printer control program to print, users of these cartridges were "accessing" the copyrighted printer control program in a way protected by DMCA.
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