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THE IP LAWS THAT PROMOTE ENSHITTIFICATION  
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Cory Doctorow
April 11, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Laws included in trade deals protect US companies’ rent
extraction schemes and stop us from fixing or improving our own
devices — from phones and tractors to insulin pumps. Repealing them
will save billions and hit Trump’s donor class. _

Mark Zuckerberg in Edvard Munch's The Scream, image: Gemini

 

Donald Trump’s tariffs demand a response. Around the world, that
response has defaulted to retaliatory tariffs — a strategy with
severe and obvious drawbacks. After years of pandemic shocks and
greedflation, people around the globe have severe inflation fatigue,
and few governments are eager to risk further price hikes. And while
the world is rightly furious at Trump’s talk of annexation and other
belligerent acts, that anger is unlikely to translate into popular
support for higher prices on everyday goods. If there’s one lesson
that politicians everywhere have metabolized over the past twenty-four
months, it’s that any government that presides over inflationary
price rises is likely to be out of a job come the next election.

 

Luckily there is another policy response to tariffs — one that will
substantially lower prices for America’s tariff-clobbered trading
partners while incubating profitable, export-oriented domestic tech
firms. These firms could sell tools and services to local businesses,
to the benefit of the world’s news and culture industries, software
firms, and consumers alike.

That response? Repealing “anticircumvention laws” that prohibits
domestic firms from reverse-engineering “digital locks.” These
anticircumvention laws stop the world’s farmers from fixing their
John Deere tractors; they stop mechanics from diagnosing your car;
they stop technologists from creating their own app stores for phones
and games consoles.

The rationale for these anticircumvention laws and their sweeping
provisions was that they were needed to secure tariff-free access to
US markets. The result has been more than a decade of rent extraction
by US tech, automotive, med-tech, and ag-tech firms.

Let Them Eat Ink

Repealing anticircumvention laws would allow the world’s small tech
companies to make — and export — tools that “jailbreak”
tractors, printers, insulin pumps, cars, consoles, and phones. We
could end the perverse system in which a euro, dollar, or peso spent
on a locally made app goes on a round trip through Cupertino,
California, and comes back 30 percent lighter.

Domestic firms could export jailbreaking tools for printers to support
third-party ink cartridge sellers — breaking the grip of the
printer-ink cartel, which has driven prices higher than $10,000 a
gallon, making ink the most expensive fluid a civilian can buy without
a permit. (You print your grocery lists with colored water that costs
more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby–winning stallion!)

All over the world, mechanics could offer flat-fee Tesla unlocking,
giving owners permanent access to all software upgrades and
subscription features —  upgrades that would persist when the car
is resold, meaning your upgrades would make your car more valuable.

 

This is a far more effective way to retaliate against Elon Musk than
voicing disgust at his Nazi salutes (Musk probably likes the
attention). Jailbreaking Teslas attacks the recurring revenue streams
that account for Tesla’s farcical price-to-earnings ratio,
undermining the value of the stock Musk uses as collateral for loans
to buy things like X/Twitter (and elections).

Forget protesting outside a Tesla dealership — kick Musk right in
the dongle. Indeed, repealing anticircumvention is a frontal assault
on the firms whose CEOs ringed Trump on the inauguration dais.

The Politics of Digital Control

The legislative history of these anticircumvention laws is an unbroken
string of scandals. Mexico’s anticircumvention laws were passed in
the midst of the pandemic lockdowns in the summer of 2020, as part of
its accession to Trump’s US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) Treaty (the sequel
to NAFTA). These laws were so overbroad that they immediately
triggered Supreme Court review.

Then there’s Canada. Bill C-11 is Canada’s 2012 anticircumvention
law. In the run-up to C-11’s passage, then PM Stephen Harper’s
industry minister, Tony Clement (now a disgraced sex pest
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and heritage minister, James Moore, consulted on the proposal.

Six thousand one hundred ninety-three Canadians wrote in opposition to
the proposal. Just fifty-three respondents supported it. Moore
discarded all 6,193 negative comments, explaining
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Toronto meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce that these
were the “babyish” views of “radical extremists.”

 

The legacy of C-11 continues to this day. Last fall, Canada’s
Parliament passed a national right to repair bill (C-244) and an
interoperability bill (C-294). Both laws allow you to modify US tech
products, from tractors to smart toasters — provided you don’t
have to break a digital lock to do so. Of course, every abusive,
extractive product the United States exports to the Canadian market is
wrapped in digital locks, reducing those national repair and
interoperability rules to the status of useless ornaments.

Bill C-11 could be easily modified so that it would still comply with
international treaty obligations (e.g., the World Trade Organization)
without creating opportunities for rent-seeking. The law could be
amended to apply only in instances where breaking a digital lock leads
to copyright infringement_. _That modest change would keep
protections for creative works intact, while killing the racket that
takes away your right to choose where you get your repair, your apps,
and your printer ink.

From the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement to the
European Union’s Copyright and Information Society Directive 2001,
anticircumvention laws have found their way onto the lawbooks of
nearly every country in the world. Across the board, these laws were
passed as the price of tariff-free access to the US market.

Trump’s sudden, unscheduled midair disassembly of the global system
of trade is a chaotic mess, but when life gives you SARS, you’d best
make sarsaparilla.

Fixing anticircumvention law won’t end US economic imperialism, but
it is a focused, devastating attack on the most profitable lines of
business of the most profitable firms in America. There’s no other
move that delivers the same bang for the buck, won, euro, yen, real,
or rupee.

_Cory Doctorow [[link removed]] is a science fiction author,
activist, and journalist. His latest book is Red Team Blues._

_Jacobin [[link removed]] is a leading voice of the American
left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and
culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000
subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month.
Subscribe [[link removed]] to Jacobin magazine._

* Cory Doctorow
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* enshittification
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* intellectual property
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