Copyright, and what you can get away with

[jducoeur]

I've recently been seeing a fair number of articles focusing on one or another of the Librarian of Congress' new anti-circumvention rules -- basically, the official statement about what DMCA violations they specifically intend to *not* prosecute. The full list makes interesting reading. It's quite short, so you may want to look it over yourself, but summarizing my understanding of it, it allows:

• Building educational compilations of A/V works for media studies courses.


• Making archival copies of programs (specifically including video games) that can no longer be used in their original form.


• Circumventing access controls that require dongles that are no longer available. (I am amused that the jargon term "dongle" is showing up in official government documents.)


• Breaking open ebooks whose distributed format isn't accessible for, eg, text-to-speech.


• Breaking the programs that "lock" cell phones to specific cellular networks. (This is the one that surprised me, and I'm not sure the interpretation is right, but it seems to be how folks are taking it.)


• Doing what you need to do to clean up the Sony copy-protection-rootkit mess. (They don't mention Sony by name, but I'm sure that's the incident that inspired this particular rule.)

Not exactly world-changing, but a nice set of common-sense exemptions. Would that we saw more of that in government...

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I think that "dongle" may have started out as jargon, but it was passing into normal before I moved to California; DSP's software required one, and that's what we called it. This would have been pre-1992.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I expect most folks on jducoeur's list of friends don't qualify as "normal" in terms of vocabulary. :)

As a benchmark, The term "dongle" appears in the The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

[mneme]

The version actually links to the two prior rules of exception (I think this isn't actually a list of "stuff we won't prosecute" but "stuff we are declaring as legal during the next three years").

The basic diff to the prior (2003) version is:

Gone: an exception allowing people to work around internet filtering software.

Added: Rootkits, Compilations, unlocking handsets.

Emulators, dongles, and ebook accessability are preserved from the '03 version.

Thanks for the link!