For example: Trump's 2017 "Big Beautiful Tax Cut" bill passed after its 479 pages were *covered* in hand-scrawled amendments and additions, which were not read or reviewed by lawmakers prior to voting:

usatoday.com/story/news/2017/1…

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Senate passes tax bill with handwritten provisions in rush to finish

The Senate approved a tax bill early Saturday with provisions handwritten in the margins, a move that showed urgency but upset Democratic critics.

^{Bart Jansen, USA TODAY (USA TODAY)}

But one change that *was* widely known was Senator Ron Johnson's last-minute amendment to create deductions for "pass through entities."
Johnson announced that he would block the bill if his amendment didn't go through. That amendment made three of Johnson's constituents *at least half a billion dollars*: Uline owners Dick and Liz Uihlein and roofing tycoon Diane Hendricks (who collectively donated $20m to Johnson's campaign).

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All told, the Trump tax bill generated windfalls worth more than $1b for just 82 households, all of whom donated lavishly to the lawmakers who inserted incredibly specific amendments that benefited them, personally:

pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the…

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RE: mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11623921…

Here's another example: in 1999, a Congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier secured a last-minute, one-line amendment to the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act that took away musicians' ability to claim back the rights to their sound recordings after 35 years through a process called "Termination of Transfer":

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Gl…

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American lawyer and lobbyist

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Cory Doctorow

2026-03-16 14:01:28

When you think of a legal loophole, you probably imagine a drafting error (or perhaps a sneaky insertion) that creates an advantage for a specific person or group of people.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whi…

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Pluralistic: Tools vs uses (16 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

^{pluralistic.net}

This amendment whacked one group particularly hard: the Black "heritage acts" who were coerced into signing *unbelievably shitty* contracts in the 50s/ 60s/70s, who were increasingly using termination to get those rights back. For these beloved musicians, termination was the difference between going hungry and buying a couple bags of groceries every month (if this sounds familiar, it might be because you read about it in my 2024 novel *The Bezzle*):

us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…

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Glazier's treachery was so outrageous that Congress actually convened a special session to repeal his amendment, and Glazier slunk out of Congress forever...so that he could take a job at $1.3m/year as CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, where he squats to this day, insisting that he is fighting for musicians' rights:

projects.propublica.org/nonpro…

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Record Industry Association Of America Inc - Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica

Since 2013, the IRS has released data culled from over 1.8 million nonprofit tax filings. Use this database to find organizations and see details like their executive compensation, revenue and expenses, as well as download tax filings going back as f…

^ProPublica

These are the traditional loopholes - obscure codicils in legislation that allow their beneficiaries to enrich themselves at others' expense. But there's another, equally pernicious kind of loophole that gets far less attention: a loophole that *neutralizes* a beneficial part of a law, *taking away* a right that the law seems to confer.

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I have spent most of my adult life fighting against one of these rights-confiscating reverse loopholes: the "exemptions" clause to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201), which might just be the most dangerous technology law on the books:

pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sol…

Under DMCA 1201, it's a felony - punishable by a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine - to bypass an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

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This means altering software (that is, "a copyrighted work") in a device you own - a car, a tractor, a hearing aid, a smart speaker, a printer, a phone, a console, etc, etc - is a crime, *even if your alteration does not break any other laws*.

For example: there is no law requiring you to buy your printer ink from the company that sold you your printer. However, the cartel of companies that control the inkjet market all use software that is designed to block generic ink.

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You *could* turn the code off, but that would be a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, which means that, in practice, it's a felony to put generic ink in your printer. Jay Freeman calls it "felony contempt of business model."

When the DMCA was being debated, lawmakers faced fierce criticism over this clause, so they inserted a "safety valve" into the law that was supposed to prevent the kind of abuse that allows printer companies to force you to pay $10,000/gallon for ink.

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That escape valve is called the "triennial exemptions process." Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites submissions for "exemptions" to DMCA 1201. They've granted lots of these - the right to circumvent access controls on video games for preservation purposes, on DVDs for film criticism, and on various kinds of electronics for repair.

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This process may strike you as a little cumbersome - do you really have to wait up to three years to pay a lawyer to beg the government for the right to make a legal use of your own property? But this is a reverse loophole, and that means that this isn't merely cumbersome, it's *farcical*.

You see, the exemptions that the Copyright Office grants through the triennial process aren't *tools* exemptions, they're *use* exemptions.

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That means that when the Copyright Office grants an exemption giving you the right to jailbreak your car so that you can make sense of the manufacturer's diagnostic codes and turn your "check engine" light into a specific, actionable diagnosis.

*You* have that right. Your *mechanic* does *not* have that right. *You* have the right to jailbreak your car and fix it.

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But it's worse than that: your right to jailbreak your car does not mean that anyone else gets the right to make a *tool* that allows you to make that *use*. You have a *use* exemption, but there is no *tool* exemption. That means that *you*, personally, must reverse-engineer the firmware in your car, identify a fault in the code, and leverage that to *personally* write software to turn the diagnostic codes into diagnoses.

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You are not allowed to talk to anyone else about this. You're not allowed to publish your findings. You're certainly not allowed to share the tool you create with anyone else.

This is true of *all* the exemptions the Copyright Office grants.

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If you're a film professor who's been given the right to jailbreak DVDs, you are expected to write your own DVD decrypting software, without help from anyone else, and if you manage it, you can't tell anyone else how you did it.

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If you're an iPhone owner who's been granted the right to jailbreak your phone and install a different app store, then *you*, personally, must identify a a vulnerability in iOS and develop it into an exploit that you are only allowed to use on your own devices. Every other iPhone owner has to do the same thing.

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DMCA 1201 has been copy-pasted into law-books all over the world. In Europe, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive (EUCD6). When Norway implemented this law, lawmakers included a bunch of use exemptions in a bid to placate the fierce opposition they faced. One of these exemptions allowed blind people to jailbreak ebooks so they could be used with Braille printers, screen readers, and other assistive devices.

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In 2003, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister responsible for the bill. He proudly trumpeted this exemption, so I started asking him questions about it:

> How do blind people get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

> No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

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> Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

> No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse-engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

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> Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

> Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcb…

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I don't know for sure how many blind Norwegians have managed to take advantage of this use exemptions, but I'm pretty certain it's zero.

Canada's anticircumvention law was passed in 2012 through Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act. Like EUCD6, C-11 has all the defects of America's anticircumvention law. In 2024, Parliament passed a national Right to Repair law (Bill C-244) and a national Interoperability law (Bill C-294).

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Both grant *use* exemptions to Bill C-11 - they allow Canadians to jailbreak devices to fix them or extend them with code and hardware. But *neither* bill has a *tools* exemption, which means they're *useless*, since they only grant Canadians the individual, personal right to jailbreak, but they don't allow Canadian firms or tinkerers or user groups to make the tools that Canadians need to exercise the use rights that Parliament so generously granted:

pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/rad…

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Reverse loopholes are incredibly wicked. They exist solely to muddy the waters, to trick people into thinking that problems have been solved while those problems continue to fester. Hardly a week goes without my hearing from someone who's happened upon the use exemptions built into anticircumvention laws around the world and have come to the reasonable conclusion that if a law gives you the right to do something, it must also give other people the right to *help you* do it.

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Lawmakers who pass these reverse loopholes know what they're doing. They're chaffing the policy airspace, ramming through unpopular legislation under cover of a blizzard of misleading legalese.

eof/