He's a recycling evangelist.
The law did not agree.
In a couple of days he's going to prison.
There's no winning when you go up against Microsoft.
After a 6 year legal battle with the Department of Justice,
Eric Lundgren is reporting to a federal correctional facility to begin a 15 month sentence.
His crime was copying and selling CDs for restoring the Windows operating system
on broken PCs.
So why did Lundgren's crime result in a jail sentence?
The answer cuts to the heart of a major battle going on in the tech industry today.
Companies are in a battle to preserve certain aspects of US copyright law
that give them enormous power over the products we own
and in the process they're trampling our First Amendment rights.
To better understand why Eric Lundgren posed a major threat to the tech industry
consider the third party repair shops that have popped up all over the country
allowing consumers to get their devices fixed faster and cheaper.
Or a company like IFIXIT, which runs an online repair community
where people post repair tutorials on a broad range of products.
Kyle Wiens is its co-founder.
I like to say that if you can't fix it you don't really own it.
And there was this kinda dark period in the 80s and 90s
where we had all of these new gizmos that were coming out
we have VCRs, we had camcorders, we had all of these complex new gadgets
and nobody really knew how to fix them
and now that we have the internet all of this information can get shared online.
Wiens started the company in his dorm room 15 years ago when his first macbook broke.
There had been information online on how to fix it
and they had gotten a legal takedown notice from Apple and that made me angry
and so I decided 'well if they don't want people to know, maybe I want people to know.'
And so went ahead, took it apart again, took photos, put them online and the rest is history
we've been doing it ever since.
In 2016 IFIXIT did more than 21 million in sales of tools and repair kits
with 10 million monthly visitors,
the company relies on its community of over 50 thousand contributors
who offer repair tips that comprise a growing library of open source manuals.
We're going to Kansas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, we ship all over the world.
First tech companies struck back by integrating special screws and adhesives
that aren't available from third party sellers.
Then IFIXIT had it's developer account banned and app removed from the Apple Store
after it posted a tear down of the apple TV in 2015.
And for a period of time Apple was disabling iPhone 6s
when the company had detected work had been done at independent repair shops.
The company was later served with a class action lawsuit
and reimbursed thousands of effected consumers.
But none of these tactics worked, IFIXIT didn't need the app to operate their business
and the company figured out a way around those special screws and adhesives.
So tech companies turned to a provision in US copyright law
Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known as the DMCA
which makes it illegal to break digital locks protecting copyrighted work.
The law is intent was to protect creative content
like movies, music and software from being stolen and copied.
And as software increasingly replaces hardware underneath the hoods of our tech devices
this appeal to copyright law had its desired effect,
shifting the balance of power over the stuff that you buy.
Eric Lundgren was just a few weeks away from going to prison the day we spoke with him.
One man's trash is another man's treasure, right?
Well this is the world's trash and it's my treasure.
Before Lundgren landed in prison, he spent his days running a company in Los Angeles
that recycles about 40 million pounds of e-waste annually.
He's been passionate about the field since he was a teenager.
I grew up in a very small town, so I just said 'well I'll help you recycle it.'
By 18 I was doing it for American Airlines, for Coca Cola, it just blew up very fast.
All of this is, you know, keyboards and mice and power cords
and I mean a power cord, it's a cord, it can be used again and again and again
so if I get in truckloads of brand new power cords,
we're gonna put them with something new and be able to use them.
When he was 19, Lundgren relocated to Shenzhen, a city in China's Guangdong province
that became known as the Silicon Valley of hardware.
In 2011 he was basically working to source generic parts from electronics
and finding brokers in the United States and basically working as a middleman there.
That's Jake Swearingen, tech writer for New York Magazine.
A broker named Bob Wolff approached him, he had already worked with Bob Wolff in the past.
Bob Wolff would provide what's called a Dell OEM, which is Original Equipment Manufacturer,
a Dell OEM restore CD
and Lundgren would take it to a duplicate shop in china
and get tens of thousands of copies made
which then Bob Wolff would use as a broker and sell to PC refurbishers here in the United States.
When Lundgren took this Dell OEM restore CD to the duplicate shop in China
they didn't just duplicate the software on there
they duplicated everything about the CDs
so that includes the labeling on it, so the Dell logo, the Microsoft logo,
everything about it they just duplicated the whole thing wholesale.
Then in 2012, one shipment got flagged by customs, Wolff is approached by the feds
participates in a sting operation targeting Lundgren
and then ultimately the feds raid Lundgren's house in Florida.
And both he and Wolff are eventually indicted on about 21 counts
that range from conspiracy to distribute counterfeit goods to wire fraud
and a whole host of other charges.
So the government's case was that Lundgren and Wolff
were attempting to create a large scale counterfeiting enterprise.
Lundgren plead guilty to conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods
and criminal copyright infringement
and there's no doubt that he's guilty of wrongdoing.
Emails sent by Lundgren reveal
that he even pressured Wolff to sell batches of CDs that came out slightly defective
showing his eagerness to make some money off of this counterfeited merchandise.
But what's less clear is the impact his actions had on Microsoft.
One of the real problems in this case
that I feel like neither side was really able to fully resolve
is that there is no real market for a Dell OEM restore CD.
And the reason for this is is that when you buy a Dell, you get this restore CD for free.
If you lose it at any point, you can download the software off the internet for free.
It doesn't look like he really hurt anyone very seriously
and yet they're going to basically put him in a cage for 15 months.
Tom W. Bell is a law professor at Chapman University
specializing in intellectual property and copyright.
Microsoft may be firm on the law, but we can question wether, you know,
their motives are really about protecting the software.
Those motives are all about controlling software through copyright law
what tech companies are finding is that their most powerful weapon
against third party repair companies like IFIXIT.
Ever since 79 terms of copyright have gotten longer,
the rights protected have gotten more and more broad,
the sanctions against infringing have gotten more and more punitive,
all the founders cared about were books, maps and charts,
they knew about music and sculpture and paintings and architecture,
they didn't think it needed copyright.
Enter the 20th century.
For adults there's only one hot item: the VCR.
It's an invention that some say is changing the whole idea of television.
Movie studios said this violated the copyright laws.
What you started seeing was the music industry and Hollywood
really aggressively moving forward on the idea that copyright infringement
should become a criminal issue and not purely a civil one
and more particularly that people that were infringing on a large scale basis serve time in jail.
And copyright law was written so broadly, it applied to software too.
Copyright law doesn't distinguish, if you have a lot of copyrights in music
then you go and ask for stronger copyrights,
many of the provisions you'd have change in your favor
like the term of copyright, gonna benefit everybody who has a copyright.
Then as the 2000s rolled along software was suddenly everywhere.
Now we are surrounded in copyright, we are immersed in copyrighted content.
So that means tractors and cars, it means your smartphone,
it means increasingly the refrigerators and washing machines that people have in their homes.
Kit Walsh is an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also known as EFF.
She says that software's ubiquity has changed the meaning of copyright law.
There's a lingering hook that the seller has in your property
that they're arguing gives them really broad powers
to dictate how you use that property going forward.
You're not even allowed to look at what's in there,
we sold you this but you're not allowed to know how it actually works or what it's actually doing
because that's our copyrighted code, you're not allowed to look at it.
And that's presented some unintended consequences for security researchers.
Software that's deployed in cars, tractors, other important devices,
has these controls on it, which is a good thing for a security measure,
the problem is when you the owner don't have the keys or the permission to go in and open it up.
So this interferes not just with repair but also security research, safety research,
like the folks who did crash test dummies.
EFF is pushing for copyright reform on First Amendment grounds.
Code is a form of speech and courts have grappled with that because code also feels a lot like a tool
they say based on that functionality
that it's not going to be as protected as other forms of speech
even though we have case law that says if you publish instructions,
if you publish a cookbook,
if you publish even instructions that are dangerous to the reader then that's still speech.
While EFF is challenging copyright protections in court
right to repair advocates are pushing for legislation at the state and federal level.
I was testifying in front of the copyright office
saying 'hey we need to ability to repair game consoles in a cost effective manner.'
and we had the Entertainment Software Association opposing us
saying 'no if people can repair their game consoles it will enable rampant piracy.'
So we're literally fighting an army of suits, it feels like the Matrix sometimes
where there's a new suit that appears from around the corner every step of the way.
We need to actually repeal sections of 1201 of the copyright act
it's not doing anybody any good.
And we also need to, these state level right to repair laws
where you have states across the country that are saying
'hey big manufacturers, if you're going to sell products in our state
you need to support our local repair industry, you can't cut them out of the mix
you can't monopolize service.'
There are at least 18 states considering fair repair bills.
Which are modeled after the 2012 automotive right to repair law in Massachusetts
which lead to a national agreement with the auto industry
to allow independent repair shops to work on cars.
What we want is competition in the marketplace, we want the free market, we want-
the independent repair shops shouldn't have an advantage over the Apple store
they should just be able to compete on an equal footing.
For me ownership is being able to understand how something works,
the ability to not be trapped in some ecosystem, be dependent on somebody else
I'd like to be able to be self reliant, to be able to, if I have something go wrong,
understand it enough to be able to fix it.
Thats what Lundgren says he was trying to do.
When copyright is criminalized it's not just making a criminal out of this Lundgren fellow
but you can very plausibly sit down and examine what we do every day,
forwarding emails, posting stuff on Facebook, watching an unauthorized copy of a movie on YouTube
that all of us are probably many times a day now violating copyright law
and probably some of us, you know, should worry about criminal law
who owns the products that you buy?
You do.
And you need to be able to repair those and use those and give those away
and let other people benefit from whatever it is that you rightfully own.
If I have to go to prison and it's going to raise awareness, I'm happy to go.
I just want to be able to get people to become aware
and to be able to have the right to repair what they legally own.