The U.S. Copyright Office issued on Monday the results of its
triennial rulemaking on
the anticircumvention law. In this third rulemaking since the law was
passed, the Copyright Office kept three of the four exemptions it passed
last time, and
it passed new ones concerning movies on DVD and copy-protected music CDs.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) established the United
States's law, 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1), criminalizing DRM hacking (circumvention).
One of the provisions of the DMCA is that the Copyright Office has to conduct a
"rulemaking" every three years to determine if any specific types of digital
copyrighted works can be exempt from the law, i.e., can be legally hacked.
The exemptions only last until the next rulemaking, when the Copyright Office
can decide whether to renew them or not (the default case is non-renewal).
The Copyright Office solicits proposals and holds hearings as part of the
rulemaking process. This time, it received 74
proposals
for exemptions -- far more than the 51 it received last time, and ranging from
lengthy, well-researched legal briefs to brief, ill-informed polemics.
What's particularly interesting about this set of exemptions is that the
Copyright Office chose to go beyond the original requirement to express
exemptions solely in terms of the types of works; with two of the three
new exemptions, they are also specifying them in terms of the types of uses
of those works.
The exemption for copy-protected CDs is a response to the infamous "rootkit"
incident with First4Internet's XCP CD copy protection technology, which was used
by SonyBMG Music and which laid users' PCs open to viruses. It is now
legal to crack CD copy protection mechanisms, though only for the purposes of
evaluating their effects on the security of users' PCs or attempting to solve
such security problems. This exemption was proposed by Edward Felten and Alex
Halderman of Princeton University, researchers who have been working on security
flaws in CD copy protection schemes; this exemption is necessary for them to
carry out their research without fear of prosecution.
The other use-based exemption is for films on DVD. University librarians are
now allowed to circumvent the CSS encryption on DVDs for the purpose of creating
compilations of excerpts to be used in teaching. A group of film studies
professors from the University of Pennsylvania brought this one.
The final exemption passed by the Copyright Office is for firmware in mobile
phones that ties them to specific wireless carriers. Consumers are now
permitted to hack such software in order to "unlock" phones so that they can use
them with the carrier of their choice. This use of content protection is
similar to that used in cases involving
garage door openers
and laser printer
toner cartridges that have gone to court; these are all abuses of the law
that have nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with hardware vendor
competition and customer lock-in.
The three exemptions that the Copyright Office renewed for another three
years had to do with hacking eBooks for access through software that renders
them for blind and disabled people; software that requires dongles to access it,
where the dongles are broken and obsolete; and encrypted software or video games
that run on hardware that is obsolete.
It is encouraging to see the Copyright Office expand its mandate to include
classes of uses in addition to classes of digital works. Apparently they
found that limiting themselves to the latter was too confining in carrying out
the spirit of the process.
Events
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
