It’s not clear when General Electric started boobytraping appliances with DRM. I first encountered it in January when Shane Morris tweeted about his fridge refusing to accept the $19 generic filter he replaced the GE $55 filter with.

https://twitter.com/IamShaneMorris/status/1220367934947758080

The fridges use an RFID detector to distinguish original GE filters from generic replacements, and engage in lots of anti-owner trickery, like memorizing the IDs of previously used filters and refusing to accept them.

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/unauthorized-charcoal-ge-fridges-wont-dispense-ice-or-water-unless-your-filter-authenticates-as-an-official-55-component/159552/41

Morris isn’t the only one ourtaged that his fridge is plotting against him. One (anonymous) owner was so offended that they created a site dedicated to warning off potential buyers and explaining to other suckers how to bypass GE’s lockouts.

https://gefiltergate.com/

There’s a good reason for the anonymity. Under Sec 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, showing how to bypass an “access control” to a copyrighted work (eg RFID-detecting code in the fridge) is a potential felony, carrying a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.

This is quite the moral hazard. Manufacturers have learned that if they design their products so that any use that hurts their shareholders (like buying third party parts) requires bypassing DRM, it becomes a felony to use your own property to your own advantage.

Which is why we’ve seen DRM creep into all manner of devices, from insulin pumps to tractors to car engines to Iphone screens. “Felony contempt of business model” is the statute that every monopolist has dreamt of, and with DMCA 1201, they have it in their grasp.

Back in 2011, I wrote a short story about this for MIT Tech Review’s first sf anthology, called “The Brave Little Toaster” (in tribute to Tom Disch).

https://craphound.com/news/2011/09/28/the-brave-little-toaster-from-trsf/

The issue only got worse, and so last year I published “Unauthorized Bread” as part of my collection “Radicalized” (it’s being turned into a TV show by Topic):

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

The metastasis of DRM into every product category shows that when business apologists talk about the sanctity of property, they mean the sanctity of CORPORATE property.

If the manufacturer gets to override your decisions about the things you buy - and felonize any attempt to wrest control back - they property ceases to exist. We become tenants of our devices, not owners.

It’s digital feudalism, in which an elite owns all the property and we get to use it in ways they proscribe. The difference is that today, our aristocracy isn’t even human.

It’s the immortal, remorseless colony organism called the Limited Liability Corporation, to which we are mere inconvenient gut flora.

As with last year, the Mozilla Foundation’s privacy researchers have produced a guide to electronic gifts called “Privacy Not Included,” which rates gadgets on a “creepiness” scale, with devices like the Sonos One SL dumb “smart speaker” (Sonos ripped out all the junk that isn’t about playing music) getting top marks, and Ring Security Cams, Nest Cams, Amazon Echos, and other cam/mic-equipped gadgets coming in as “Super Creepy!” (the exclamation point is part of the rating).

These rankings are purely about privacy, so there’s plenty of stuff that’s extremely proprietary and hooked into app stores and other ecosystems that allow the manufacturers to control how you use your property after you buy it, as well as giving them the ability to censor the kinds of information you can receive. Many of these devices contain copyright locks (DRM) and onerous terms of service that would make it a potential felony to have them independently repaired, too, so the manufacturer gets to decide what can and can’t be fixed, and unilaterally declare that it’s time for your device to become e-waste in some distant landfill (Apple is notorious for this, and they led the charge that killed 20 state-level Right to Repair bills last year, and CEO Tim Cook started 2019 with an investor call last January that warned investors that Apple was facing a crisis because people were not replacing their devices as often as they used to, opting instead to repair them).

And this kind of thing also matters for privacy! If not for the independent repair sector, we’d have never found out that Google had made a “smart speaker” with a secret, hidden microphone, so if you were relying on the manufacturer’s specifications to evaluate the privacy dimension of a product, you could land in trouble. Likewise DRM: because security researchers face felony prosecution and massive civil liability if they reveal information that weakens a DRM system, devices with DRM (to ensure that you only use approved apps, parts or consumables) are less likely to be independently audited, and when they are, there’s a greater likelihood that the researchers will delay or bury their assessments. That means that security defects in DRM-equipped devices (many of which get top marks on privacy) can fester for longer and do more damage before coming to light.

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/27/creepiness-scale.html

Nice, I didn’t know about this guide.

Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.

Customers will receive refunds.

This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.

When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.

People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html