Article 6 Killed Them, and It Was Legal

Article 6 killed them, and it was legal

There’s a law that made Dieselgate possible, and it’s still on the books in Europe. It doesn’t have Volkswagen’s name on it. It’s Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive — the anti-circumvention rule that makes it a crime to reverse-engineer software that’s wrapped in digital locks.

That sounds like an obscure piece of intellectual-property plumbing, but look at what it actually did. It put legal liability on the reverse engineers — the people who might have pried open Volkswagen’s emissions software and discovered the lethal crime. Because examining that code was illegal, nobody did. And so Volkswagen got away with Dieselgate, and thousands of Europeans died every year from the pollution the defeat devices hid.

What anti-circumvention actually protects

Anti-circumvention law was sold as a shield for copyright. In practice it’s a shield for whoever locks something down — and that turns out to be some of the most dangerous people in the world. If you can’t legally take apart the software in a thing you own, then the company that owns the software can do anything inside it and dare you to look.

Volkswagen is the proof. The company fitted roughly 11 million cars worldwide with software that detected when it was being tested and cut emissions, then switched the pollution back on the moment the test ended. It took years and a handful of outside researchers to expose it — researchers who were doing, in effect, the reverse engineering that European law was actively criminalizing.

The chilling effect is the point

Doctorow’s framing is precise: the crime isn’t just that VW cheated. It’s that anti-circumvention created a chilling effect that let the cheating go undiscovered. The law doesn’t just fail to stop the fraud — it’s the reason the fraud survived. Impose legal liability on the people who might blow the whistle, and the whistle never gets blown.

“Anti-circumvention law is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate. By imposing legal liability on reverse-engineers who might have discovered this lethal crime, Article 6 of the Copyright Directive created a chilling effect, and thousands of Europeans died, every year.” — Cory Doctorow, The Post-American Internet, 39C3

Why this is the purest enshittification

This is the terminal form of the rot. Enshittification usually degrades a product to extract money. Here, a law was twisted to protect the degradation itself — to keep deadly behavior safe from scrutiny. The victims aren’t even customers being nickel-and-dimed; they’re people breathing the air near the cars.

The fix is the same one Doctorow has spent his career on: legalizing reverse engineering. If the EU repealed Article 6, the people who own things could take them apart — and the companies that hide crimes inside software would lose their safest hiding place. A society where you can’t legally inspect the software in a thing you bought is a society where the software can kill you and the law is on the killer’s side.

Watch: Dieselgate: The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal