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Feds Consider New DMCA Anti-Circumvention Exemptions

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

It's that time again when the Librarian of Congress considers carving out anti-circumvention exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The U.S. Copyright Office has set(.pdf) a 5 p.m. EST Tuesday deadline to apply for exemptions, with about a dozenbeing granted in a decade.

The DMCA, which President Clinton signed ten years ago, dictates "no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

But under the law, every three years the Librarian of Congress is charged with considering the public's request for exemptions to that anti-circumvention language.

An exception adopted during the last review in 2006 granted mobile-phone owners the right to circumvent the technological locks on their phones.

Doing that could allow a user to switch phone carriers without buying a new phone. Yet the ruling did not require the telephone carriers to unlock their customers' phones, and marketing of the software or hardware to unlock the phones still remains illegal.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann points outthat the government "has repeatedly dismissed any consumer-oriented fair uses, such as making backup copies of DVDs or video games, as well as requests for exemptions to enable copying DVDs to laptops and portable devices."

Von Lohmann declared the DMCA exemption process "hopelessly broken."

Other granted exemptions allow circumvention of anti-copying restrictions on DVDs for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in a classroom. Another was directed at the blind, allowing the circumvention of an e-book's shuttered read-aloud function. Another allows the circumvention of access controls on CDs to research for security flaws.

The government did not say when it would decide whether to adopt new exemptions.

See Also:

• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
• YouTube to McCain: You Made Your DMCA Bed, Lie in It
• 10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA is the Law That Saved the Web ...
• Google, EFF Applaud Veoh DMCA Ruling
• Coupon Hacker Defeats DMCA Suit
• Air Force Cyber Command's New Weapon: DMCA Notices
• Universal Says DMCA Takedown Notices Can Ignore 'Fair Use ...
• Stifled by Copyright, McCain Asks YouTube to Consider Fair Use ...

Full post as published by Threat Level on December 01, 2008 (boomark / email).