![]() ![]() ![]() Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act exposes those rivals to $500,000 in fines and a five-year prison sentence for trafficking in tools that bypass an “access control” for a copyrighted work, like the firmware on a Dymo printer. Copyright law gives Dymo a powerful tool to intimidate commercial rivals who help us escape from label-jail. … so far, no vendor has stepped in to offer a jailbreaking tool to let you modify your label maker to serve your interests, not Dymo’s shareholders. The reason they don’t say this is obvious: no one wants this. This lets Dymo’s products distinguish between Dymo’s official labels and third-party consumables … what they don’t say is that this printer forces you to buy Dymo’s own labels, which are substantially more expensive than many of its competitors’ labels (Dymo’s labels retail for about $10-$15 per roll alternatives, about $2-$5 per roll). I’d like to highlight five news reports from the past couple of weeks that have a direct or indirect bearing on us as writers (and readers, of course).įirst, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports on an interesting development where technology runs headlong into copyright law.ĭymo’s latest generation of desktop label printers use RFID chips to authenticate the labels that Dymo’s customers put in their printers.
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