September 05, 2003
You can access your car again

In a rare blow for sense in the DMCA muddle, an Illinois district court ruled that replacement garage door openers were not "circumvention" devices under the DMCA's anticircumvention provision. Chamberlain, a maker of garage door opener devices, claimed that Skylink's interoperable replacements circumvented its access controls, but couldn't manage to show the court how accessing one's own car was the kind of harm Congress envisioned when passing the DMCA. Maybe if they'd called it a boat garage ...

Posted by Wendy at 07:57 AM