Anti-circumvention: You Don’t Completely “Own” Everything That You Buy

17 U.S.C. 1201, the “anti-circumvention” provision of the Copyright Act, makes it illegal for a user of a “digital good” to access certain copyrighted information, like a computer program’s code, if the code is so written to disallow access to it. For example, if a user purchases a new smartphone that implements a measure to block access to its operating system’s code, and the user “circumvents” that measure to see the code, that user has…