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The article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion: > Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those ef
by bambax 1y ago
The article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion:
> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)
> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)
> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.
Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
- tgv 1y agoThere already are alternative app stores for iOS and Android. They don't seem to do well. There's no "flocking."
- krzyk 1y agoSo the inevitable end of the world that Apple App store apologists predicated didn't happen.
- isodev 1y agoI believe F-Droid is doing quite ok. So is the Galaxy Store. On iOS, Apple created a very complicated process which is region and even country-specific. Hopefully this will change once the EU, the US, Japan and everyone else currently suing Apple is done with them. But I do share the sentiment from the article - I wish it wasn't necessary to escalate such matters to the level of regulation
- Voultapher 1y agoAt least on iOS Apple has just been fined 500 million - as a start - because the way they implemented third-party app stores was so blatantly against the DMA. I think we simply don't yet know how users and corporations will react to it.
- schnitzelstoat 1y agoI agree with him that the retaliatory tariffs don't make much sense but equally basically throwing out copyright law would be crazy, as the US would likely respond in kind and it'd probably hurt Europe more in the long run. They should stop the anti-competitive practices that prevent third-party app stores and so on though.
- like_any_other 1y agoGetting rid of circumvention and reverse-engineering bans is not remotely "copyright law". It is restoring basic ownership rights to our own property.
- Mindwipe 1y agoYou would effectively have to exit all international copyright law treaties to do so, which is defacto removing any international recognition of copyright for works from your country.
- rwmj 1y agoNot really. A digital lock is not a creative endeavour in the same way we think of books or records.
- like_any_other 1y agoCopyright is covered by the Berne convention, which prohibits neither circumvention nor reverse-engineering, so even in this "what you're proposing couldn't easily be done without also doing this other thing, so I'm going to pretend you've proposed that other thing also, but I won't say so explicitly" interpretation, that is not true.
- Mindwipe 1y ago> That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA. > The answer is tariffs, it seems. No it isn't. Like literally, the US and it's tariff madness has literally nothing to do with it. The EU and Canada are both signatories to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and signatories of the WTO provisions that include continued operation to it. They are international treaties with a wide degree of international support, not US inventions. Christ, Europe had a lot more to do with the wording of the anticircumvention provisions in the WIPO treaty than the US did. People should stop taking Doctorow seriously. He has a long track record of making shit up that is what his audience wants to hear.
- rwmj 1y agoBecause of course we can never change international treaties.
- like_any_other 1y agoThey can be, but the point remains that it is not US tariffs forcing Europe into them - it is the doing of their own governments (whose preferences should not be confused with those of their citizens).
- Teever 1y agoThe assumption underlying this is that the governments that implement the WIPO treaty are doing so without duress or threat of tariffs from the United States which may or may not be true. We'll never know. But what we do know is that the EU has recently put regulations in place that allow them to curtail the IP privileges given to companies in countries that they feel economically threatened by. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument It will be interesting to see them use this or if the mere existence of the law is and the mere possibility of use is them using it.
- hoseja 1y agoYou do realize that US still enjoys its cryptohegemony. CIA surely has a lot of levers to ensure uppity euros don't undermine profits.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]