But security researchers have run into a surprising roadblock: copyright law. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the “circumvention” of digital rights management software that locks down media. The DMCA was intended to keep digital movies and music safe from pirates who’d upload them onto the Internet (fat lot of good that has done), but it has been repurposed for some unintended consequences. Technology companies regularly threaten security researchers who try to look inside their products, arguing that these products contain copyrighted software that must be kept secret, because reasons. (Never mind that these reasons never have much to do with copyright; the resale value of the software inside a garage door opener is nil.)
Despite the fact that this kind of tinkering is explicitly legal under every states’ trade secret laws, tech companies try to use copyright threats under the DMCA to shut it down, keeping the security community in the dark about vulnerabilities in the devices we use every day. As more things have software inside them — from baby monitors to firearms — the risks to privacy and safety are mounting. Anything that can think for itself is also something that can be mind-controlled; looking inside its digital brain is the only way to be confident it hasn’t been hit with an Imperius curse. Welcome to the Internet of Things That Can Kill You.
