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Librarian of Congress Still Clueless About Linux

By Pamela Jones et al.

There are new anticircumvention rules from the US Copyright Office. Several are very good changes, such as allowing you to bypass a technological protection measure to use snips from a movie or video if your purpose is educational or for comment or criticism, and there's more flexibility for phone apps if interoperability is the goal:

"When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses," the Copyright Office stated.

"It's gratifying that the Copyright Office acknowledges this right and agrees that the anticircumvention laws should not interfere with interoperability," commented Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney, Corynne McSherry.

Keep in mind that copyright infringement is separate from DMCA analysis, so you still have to be careful about staying within the fair use boundaries when making a documentary. But at least now you can legally access. And while you can jailbreak your iPhone with respect to the DMCA, there's remains the issue of breaking the warranty.

But Linux got bonked on the head again. They essentially ruled that if you want to access DVDs or streaming videos, like with Netflix's "Watch Instantly" service, you have to buy a PC or an Apple computer or a DVD player. I wonder why they don't see that this situation is identical to the jailbreaking a smartphone, or should be? What's the difference? Linux users want to view movies too, and all they want is interoperability so they can. I wonder how Hollywood would like it if the government told them that to make their movies they couldn't use Linux but instead had to use a Windows PC or an Apple computer? Hollywood uses Linux to make their movies, but they oppose letting us view their products on Linux? Why? If the government is going to regulate operating systems and compel citizens to buy certain vendors' products as opposed to the ones we want to use, I think it should at least be consistent. Actually, I don't think any government should compel use of any private company's products, and I wish that argument had been presented. Maybe next time.

I'll show you the relevant language in the document Determination of the Librarian of Congress and Text of the Regulation [PDF].

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 26, 2010 (boomark / email).