Copyright Law and My Mother's Heart - Public Knowledge

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-01-21

Summary:

" ... This is the same situation faced by another cardiac patient named Hugo Campos. In this TEDx talk, he talks about how he—an obsessive quantifier of his life's habits—lacks the ability to know what the machine inside his chest is seeing and doing. Although Hugo, like all of us, has technology available in his phone and other consumer devices to track how much he eats, drinks, sleeps, and exercises, he can't do the same thing with the device that keeps his heart going.  There's a host of reasons why this is the case. Manufacturers are tight-lipped about giving people access to the data and to the machines that would let them get that data. They raise questions about competitors accessing their proprietary systems. They sometimes mention security reasons (though a number of researchers say that the existing security is poor—a real problem if attackers can access what the patients can't). And, since we've seen it abused so often before, there's the question of copyright, and the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ... Though the factual data itself being sent from the device to the base station (and from there to the monitoring service) shouldn't be covered by copyright, the software running on the implants, in the base station, and in the machines at the monitoring service's and doctors' offices likely is. Getting around any access control measures to access that copyrighted software potentially violates the DMCA. We've seen device makers trying to use the DMCA to keep people fromunlocking their phonesturning their videogame consoles into more general-purpose computers, or even using generic printer toner cartridges.  So naturally, Hugo and others are worried that the same overbroad law might stand in the way of them getting at the critical data that's being generated by his heart, beat by beat, stored in the devices in his body and in his home, and using it in realtime to adjust his life to keep his heart on an even keel ..."

Link:

https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/copyright-law-and-my-mothers-heart

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.data oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.lay oa.dmca oa.legislation oa.libre

Date tagged:

01/21/2015, 10:44

Date published:

01/21/2015, 05:44