For Science! US Government Says It’s OK To Hack Your Car, Tablet Or Smart TV

© Thomas Peter / Reuters

Every 36 months, the US Copyright Office – a division of the Library of Congress – meets to hear petitions and review the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) provision 1201. The provision is the anti-circumvention part of the law that had, in the past, made it illegal to ‘unlock’ your smartphone from its carrier and helped corporations protect copyrighted material.

The Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization that supports open-source software, took advantage of this period of review by petitioning for an exemption to the DMCA that would allow people to ‘hack’ their smart TVs. The exemptions were granted on Tuesday, but they are only set to last three years – until the next review cycle.

The new rules are meant to allow for “lawful modification”and “good faith security research.”

While you can continue to legally jailbreak your phone, you can now do the same with your tablet and smart TV. E-readers, laptops and desktop computers are still off-limits. The hacking of video game consoles is also prohibited, as the Copyright Office found that removing their limitations is correlated with the piracy of video games.

Also included is an exemption for teachers, allowing them to circumvent access controls on DVDs so they can, for example, put together clips from several copyrighted works for educational purposes.

The decision includes language that addresses concerns opponents of the move, who contend that it would be used to facilitate the piracy of copyrighted media. Instead, the Register of Copyrights argues, users tinkering with their smart TVs could gain legitimate uses and increased functionality.

This move was opposed by automakers such as General Motors and tractor maker John Deere, who said the owners of vehicles ought to visit authorized repair shops to modify their cars rather than doing it themselves.

“Sensitive vehicle data could be easily manipulated, altered, or distributed – undetected – if these changes are implemented,”GM said in a statement, quoted by the Guardian.

Deere and GM previously drew controversy when they tried to argue to the Copyright Office that the owners of the vehicles that the companies manufacture didn’t fully own them, and therefore didn’t have the right to make “unauthorized” repairs to them.

Deere said that because their tractors are so fundamentally reliant on the software that is the company’s intellectual property, those who purchase the vehicles only have “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”GM had similarly argued that many people mistakenly “conflate ownership of a vehicle with ownership of the underlying computer software.”