The Electronic Frontier Foundation is attempting to overturn a US copyright provision that can stop people from doing anything from remixing videos to fixing cars. In a lawsuit filed today, it argues that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s rules against circumventing copy protection — designed to stop people from pirating copyrighted works — places unconstitutional limits on free speech.

The EFF filed suit on behalf of Johns Hopkins computer science researcher Matthew Green and hacker / inventor Andrew "bunnie" Huang, both of whom argue that the DMCA’s rules are impeding their work. They’re seeking a confirmation that the framework is restrictive, over-broad, and a violation of the First Amendment. It would be a major blow against one of the most controversial, and most unnecessarily harmful, sections of the DMCA.

The lawsuit takes on what are often called anti-circumvention rules or "Section 1201" rules, which ban any attempt to bypass a system that protects copyrighted work. They’re intended to stop people from doing something like stripping out the DRM on a movie and uploading it to a piracy site, but that’s come with a host of unintended consequences. Green, for example, argues that he can’t investigate computer security vulnerabilities in without worrying about being held liable for breaking a copy protection system in the process. Huang, meanwhile, says that he can’t build tools for legally capturing and editing digital video because of a copy protection system that limits viewing video over HDMI.

These rules are the opposite of how copyright law should work

But the implications are much broader than these two cases. Because so many parts of our lives revolve around tools that run off copyrighted software, anti-circumvention rules can effectively ban people from tinkering with their own devices in ways that have nothing to do with preventing piracy. Unlocking a phone to use with another carrier, for example, probably violates the rules. So does fixing your own car, if the problem involves its computer software systems. So does making a video game playable after its developer abandons it. And that's not even touching all the non-infringing applications of ripping, clipping, and remixing digital media.

You might notice that all these things actually are legal, for the moment. That’s because the Librarian of Congress periodically examines and approves a series of exemptions to the anti-circumvention rules, allowing people to bypass copy protection in order to do unambiguously legal things. These exemptions are usually very specific (at one point, it was legal to jailbreak phones but not tablets) and have to be actively renewed every few years. The EFF has been behind several of these exemptions in the past, but in this suit, it wants to establish that the system "is itself an unconstitutional speech-licensing regime," not a fix for the DMCA's problems.

Of all the unintentionally restrictive, frequently misapplied parts of the US copyright system, anti-circumvention rules are one of the worst. They work on completely backwards logic: instead of defining special cases where bypassing copy protection enables copyright infringement, they require people engaging in clearly protected and legal activities to ask for permission. And they do so in a way that ends up making creative expression harder — the exact opposite of what copyright law is supposed to do. This is hardly the first time that the EFF has complained about Section 1201, but it's one of the clearest recent challenges.