The IP Laws That Stop Disenshittification
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.
Apple iPhone 16s are seen on display at an Apple store on April 4, 2025, in New York, New York. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
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), 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 to a 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.