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the hotrodders who want to chip their cars to tweak the performance settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming that their printer cartridges contain copyrighted works -- software that trips an \"I am empty\" flag when the toner runs out, and have sued a competitor who made a remanufactured cartridge that reset the flag. Even garage-door opener companies have gotten in on the act, claiming that their receivers\' firmware are copyrighted works. Copyrighted cars, print carts and garage-door openers: what\'s next, copyrighted light-fixtures? 

Even in the context of legitimate -- excuse me, \"traditional\" -- copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news. Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and their assignees some rights, but it also reserves some rights to the public. For example, an author has no right to prohibit anyone from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the blind. More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say over what you can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If I buy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It\'s my property. Not my \"intellectual property\" -- a whacky kind of pseudo-property that\'s swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements and limitations -- but real, no-fooling, actual tangible *property* -- the kind of thing that courts have been managing through property law for centuries. 

But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there\'s no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you\'ve paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I\'m done with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this \"First Sale,\" but it may be simpler to think of it as \"Capitalism.\" 

The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called DVD-CCA, and they have a bunch of licensing requirements for anyone who gets a key from them. Among these is something called region-coding: if you buy a DVD in France, it\'ll have a flag set that says, \"I am a European DVD.\" Bring that DVD to America and your DVD player will compare the flag to its list of permitted regions, and if they don\'t match, it will tell you that it\'s not allowed to play your disc. 

Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets to do this. When we wrote the copyright statutes and granted authors the right to control display, performance, duplication, derivative works, and so forth, we didn\'t leave out \"geography\" by accident. That was on-purpose. 

So when your French DVD won\'t play in America, that\'s not because it\'d be illegal to do so: it\'s because the studios have invented a business-model and then invented a copyright law to prop it up. The DVD is your property and so is the DVD player, but if you break the region-coding on your disc, you\'re going to run afoul of anticircumvention. 

That\'s what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who wanted to watch French DVDs on his Norwegian DVD player. He and some pals wrote some code to break the CSS so that he could do so. He\'s a wanted man here in America; in Norway the studios put the local fuzz up to bringing him up on charges of *unlawfully trespassing upon a computer system.* When his defense asked, \"Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?\" the answer was: \"His own.\" 

His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropriated by 
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