One of the worst ideas that the copyright maximalists have managed to foist on the world is that there should be anti-circumvention laws forbidding users from doing a range of entirely sensible things with their own possessions, simply „because copyright“. Required by the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and implemented by the DMCA (pdf) in the US, and Copyright Directive in the EU, anti-circumvention laws have reduced people in the US to begging for permission to unlock their mobile phones, or to check whether software in their car is lying about emissions. In the EU, they are not even allowed to beg.