Eat it, DMCA
The US Copyright Office has made some "adjustments" to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that heinous piece of ill-conceived legislature that favors increasing the bottom-line of the big corporate interests that had too much of a hand in helping write the law, against the the end users of various content. The Library of Congress, which oversees the Copyright Office, reviews and authorizes exemptions every three years to ensure that the law does not prevent certain non-infringing use of copyright-protected material.
This has the potential to be huge. And you better believe that those aforementioned big corporate interests are going to fight it tooth and nail. Among other things, the revisions allow end users to:
These points have been a sore spot among users of digital content ever since the incorporation of the DCMA, and easing these restrictions go a long way toward allowing the use of content on legally owned devices, without constantly re-paying for the same content or running afoul of laws when trying to use tools and applications otherwise abandoned by their creators. These exemptions should have been in place at the beginning, and hopefully this will lead to an ability to use digital content the same way we've been able to use their respective physical versions.
Finally, some help for the little guys. More info can be found here.
This has the potential to be huge. And you better believe that those aforementioned big corporate interests are going to fight it tooth and nail. Among other things, the revisions allow end users to:
- "Jailbreak" their smartphones to allow code and apps obtained from any legal source (third party apps in iPhone, for example, not obtained through the iTunes store, for example),
- Let researchers, educators and the like to circumvent the copy controls on digital media such as DVDs to include fair-use short clips of content for educational and other uses,
- Allows opening up digital media for alternative delivery means, i.e., allows another wise locked-in e-book title to me used by services and applications that allow reading by visually impaired people, or to allow text-to-speech on otherwise read-only titles,
- Allows people to break the usage and copy controls placed on software that use a dongle or other means to restrict copying and allows operation only on the dongle-equipped computer if the software is obsolete and the dongle cannot be replaced.
These points have been a sore spot among users of digital content ever since the incorporation of the DCMA, and easing these restrictions go a long way toward allowing the use of content on legally owned devices, without constantly re-paying for the same content or running afoul of laws when trying to use tools and applications otherwise abandoned by their creators. These exemptions should have been in place at the beginning, and hopefully this will lead to an ability to use digital content the same way we've been able to use their respective physical versions.
Finally, some help for the little guys. More info can be found here.