Louis Rossmann put out a long talk from Austin announcing a US tour by the Fulu Foundation. The goal is simple: repeal or reform Section 1201 of the DMCA — the bit that makes bypassing a digital lock a federal crime, even when you’re fixing something you already bought.
Worth a watch if you care about repair. Here’s the short version.
The problem in one sentence
You pay once. The company keeps control forever — and the law backs them up.
Examples that actually happened
Rossmann doesn’t deal in hypotheticals. The talk is a pile of real cases:
- Sony sold “purchased” video content, then removed it from people’s libraries when licensing changed.
- Textbook platforms sell a “lifetime” license that means up to five years, tied to an app that can disappear.
- A $400 baby monitor got a firmware update that locked sleep tracking behind a subscription.
- A wheelchair had its top speed reduced unless the owner paid to unlock it again.
- Smart thermostats (Future Home, Nest) were bricked or deprecated until people paid yearly fees — or found illegal workarounds.
- Exercise bikes blocked third-party apps after a firmware update, right when the vendor wanted you on their subscription.
- John Deere tractors — farmers can’t fix them during harvest because dealer-only software locks get in the way.
- Digital games that worked offline until the servers shut down. Gone.
- Amazon Prime adding ads mid-subscription; courts treating that as a “service change,” not a price hike.
Same pattern everywhere: buy the hardware, rent the capability.
Why repair people care about copyright law
Section 1201 wasn’t written for tractors and thermostats. It was meant to stop piracy. Bruce Lehman, who helped architect the DMCA, has since admitted the approach didn’t work and that it was pushed through via treaty pressure on Congress.
Thirty years later, it’s the reason an independent fixer can go to federal prison for showing you how to unbrick a thermostat. Rossmann ran bounty programs to prove workarounds exist — developers won the money and then refused to publish the fix because of the legal risk.
That’s the gap between “you’re allowed to repair it yourself” and “good luck finding anyone who’ll help you.”
The legislative ask: support the Freedom to Fix Act, which would decriminalize bypassing digital locks for repair.
What this has to do with a machine shop
Manufacturing isn’t separate from this trend. CNC controls, probing systems, tool presetters, DNC boxes — more of the stack is software-locked every year. A machine you could maintain with a manual and a phone call becomes a machine that needs a vendor login, a subscription, or a certified technician because the encryption says so.
Farmers with John Deere tractors hit the same wall shop owners will hit on the next generation of connected equipment. If the vendor can change what your purchase means after the sale, your downtime is their leverage.
The part that stuck with me
Industry lobbyists show up to hearings and say right-to-repair laws are “a solution in search of a problem.” Rossmann’s answer is to document the problem in public — bounties, postcards, showing up at city council — until that’s no longer credible.
EFF Austin had a concrete win: organized citizens blocked AI surveillance cameras in city parks and got ALPRs banned locally. Rossmann’s point is that the other side is small, well-funded, and always motivated. The pro-ownership side tends to assume nothing will change. He’s trying to fix that with a tour and a community at fulu.org.
Bottom line
The video is a rally, not a legal brief. The argument: modern products are sold as purchases but run as rentals. Section 1201 criminalizes the workarounds. If you build or fix things for a living — machines, software, either — that’s your problem too, even if you’re not in the US.
Short enough to watch at lunch. Long enough to make you angry about a cat door that needs a proprietary hub plugged directly into your router.