The Librarian of Congress released an important statement yesterday exempting addition conduct from the anti-circumvention restrictions under the DMCA. These exemptions are largely the result of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Librarian of Congress stated “Persons who circumvent access controls in order to engage in noninfringing uses of works in these six classes will not be subject to the statutory prohibition against circumvention.” The recommendation of the Register of Copyrights is available here and the text of the publication of the rule in the Federal Register is available here.
The 3 exemptions that will have the largest immediate impact are exemptions 1, 2 and 6. In general, the new exemptions are, : general”
- Exemption 1 deals with circumvention of short portions of movies for criticism or commentary for educational use, documentaries and noncommercial videos.
- Exemption 2 deals with circumvention to jailbreak iphones (or root Android phones) and to unlock phones to switch carriers.
- Exemption 6 deals with circumvention of ebooks to enable read aloud function or to render text in a specialized (magnified) format.
The exemptions do not authorize or permit the software that is used to circumvent the access controls. Apple’s webpage dealing with jailbreaking is available here and may void the warranty.The Cult of Mac posted Apple’s response here.
We will see how this impacts this emerging market.
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