Trump’s tariffs demand a response, but retaliatory tariffs have severe drawbacks. Canadians have inflation fatigue and while they are rightly furious at the president’s talk of annexation, their patience for higher prices on imported goods will surely wear thin. Given that Canada has spent the past 40 years reorienting its economy around exporting raw materials to the United States and importing finished goods back from America, a 25 percent tariff on US imports affects a giant portion of the goods Canadians purchase.

However, there is another policy response to tariffs, one that will substantially lower prices for Canadians, while incubating profitable, export-oriented Canadian tech firms, whose products can be sold by community-based small and medium enterprises, to the benefit of the Canadian news and culture industry, Canadian software firms, and Canadian consumers.

That response? Repealing Bill C-11, a 2012 law that prohibits Canadian firms from reverse-engineering digital “locks.” Bill C-11 is nominally a copyright law, but it’s more accurate to call it a lock law. C-11 is an “anticircumvention” measure, and it bans tampering with any technology that restricts access to a copyrighted work, even if no copyright infringement takes place.

Let’s unpack that some: I write books, and I sometimes go into a studio and record the audiobook, paying a director, a producer and an editor. The largest market for audiobooks in the world is Audible, a division of Amazon, which claims more than 90 percent of the market for science fiction novels.

Audible has a policy: every book it sells has to be encased in one of Amazon’s digital locks. Bill C-11 bans tampering with this lock, which means it’s illegal to make an audiobook player that can play back my books, unless Amazon gives you permission. It’s also illegal to make a tool to convert my audiobooks to another format, one that will play back on a non-Amazon player.

That means that if I, a Canadian author who has written, performed and produced an audiobook, wish to give you, a Canadian reader of mine, a tool that will let you move the audiobooks you’ve bought from the US monopoly bookseller into an app made by a Canadian company, I commit a crime. By giving you the tools you need to bypass Amazon’s locks, I become a criminal—even if I’m providing you with a tool to access an audiobook I wrote, financed, and performed.

Because C-11’s “anticircumvention” provisions apply whether or not a copyright infringement takes place, they stop Canadian farmers from fixing their John Deere tractors; they stop Canadian mechanics from diagnosing your car; they stop Canadian entrepreneurs from creating their own app stores for phones and games consoles. The rationale for Bill C-11’s 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.

Repealing Bill C-11 would allow Canadian tech companies to make—and export—tools that “jailbreak” tractors, printers, insulin pumps, cars, consoles and phones, so that they will accept third-party software, service, repairs, parts, and consumables. We could end the perverse world in which the dollar a Canadian iPhone owner pays to a Canadian software author for an app goes on a roundtrip through Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter. Canadian firms could export jailbreaking tools for printers for use by third-party ink cartridge sellers who attack the printer-ink cartel, which has raised the price of ink to more than $10,000 per gallon, making it the most expensive fluid a civilian can buy without a permit.

Canadian mechanics could offer one-price Tesla unlocking, giving Canadian Tesla owners access to all the software upgrades and subscription features in their cars, permanently, so these features would persist when the car was sold on as a used vehicle, meaning your upgrades would make your car more valuable.

This is a far more effective way to retaliate against Elon Musk than voicing your disgust at his Nazi salutes—this attacks the recurring revenue streams that account for Tesla’s farcical price to earnings ratio, undermining the value of the stock Elon Musk uses as collateral for loans to buy things like Twitter (and elections). Forget protesting outside a Tesla dealership—kick Musk right in the dongle.

There’s no need to stop with Tesla. A Canadian software company could sell mechanics tools to diagnose every make and model of every car made, kept up to date through a subscription fee. This would replace the existing diagnostic tools offered by the giant auto manufacturers, who charge $10,000 and up per year for the right to diagnose their cars.

Indeed, repealing C-11 is a frontal assault on the firms whose CEOs ringed Trump on the inauguration dais.

Bill C-11 never should have passed. When Harper ministers Tony Clement and James Moore consulted on the law in 2010, more than 6,000 Canadians wrote in to oppose it; they only received 53 comments in support. Nevertheless, Moore vowed to press on with his legislation, characterizing the opposition as the “babyish” views of “radical extremists.”

Today, Moore and Clement’s anticircumvention law touches Canadians’ lives in a thousand ways, and all of them are bad. It’s not just having your pocket picked by American companies—anticircumvention law has had a major chilling effect on security research. Researchers who want to evaluate whether the cameras and other sensors in your home, your pocket, your car, or worn on your body are secure against networked attacks fear legal retaliation under anticircumvention laws. Needless to say, criminal hackers have no such fear.

The European Union adopted its own version of this law in 2003, with Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive. Last year, security researchers in Poland revealed that the train manufacturer Newag had boobytrapped its locomotives, so that they would sense when they had been parked in a competitor’s maintenance depot, and immobilize themselves if so. Newag charged €20,000 to get the trains moving again, blaming mysterious software errors.

When the researchers from Dragon Sector revealed their findings, Newag brought suit under Europe’s anticircumvention laws, because Dragon Sector had bypassed Newags software locks in order to reverse-engineer the logic bomb the manufacturer had hidden in each of its locomotives.

We know about Newag because Dragon Sector braved Newag’s wrath—and substantial legal jeopardy—to come forward with their findings. We don’t know how many other dirty secrets and ‘Dieselgates’ are lurking in our nannycams, smart watches, cars, pacemakers and insulin pumps.

Bill C-11 could be easily modified so that it will still comply with international treaty obligations (such as those set by the World Trade Organization) without creating opportunities for rent-seeking. The federal government could simply amend the law so that it only applies in instances where breaking a digital lock leads to copyright infringement.

That modest amendment 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.

Cory Doctorow is a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.