Wellington Grey has a great little slideshow about the idiocy of the DMCA's "anti-circumvention" measures, which prohibit breaking the digital locks off the stuff you own. In it, Grey recounts how offended he was when he bought a TomTom GPS that came with a CD in a sealed envelope, the seal on which read, "By breaking this seal, you agree to our contract," but the contract itself was on the CD, behind the seal. In other words, the CD said, "By breaking this seal, you agree to a bunch of secret stuff."

So Grey opted to break extract the CD by slitting the envelope with a pair of scissors, thus evading the abusive "agreement." Then he goes on to point out that if the DMCA applied to physical objects as well as digital objects, scissors would be illegal.

It's a great little illustration -- just the kind of thing you might want to show to the info-civilians in your life when they want to understand why anti-circumvention is such a bad idea. Link (via Making Light)