It's that time again!
Like a bureaucratic comet which makes its way to Earth once every three years, the US Copyright Office is now considering exemptions to the annoyingly-named Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
This year's requests are shaping up to be largely a retread of the 2006 version. Over half of the 19 current submissions (cutely enough, the Office is still waiting for potential snail mail submissions to arrive) are requests for extensions or expansions of previously-granted exemptions, with a heavy emphasis on decrypting DVDs and other protected formats for educational use and uses otherwise covered under Fair Use.
A few of the new requests bear looking into. I wholeheartedly applaud this one, which appears to seek permission to execute vigilante vivisection against the most craptastic copy-protection schemes currently in use. Meanwhile, Linux devotees who think the rules don't apply to them are getting a little tiresome.
This year's requests are shaping up to be largely a retread of the 2006 version. Over half of the 19 current submissions (cutely enough, the Office is still waiting for potential snail mail submissions to arrive) are requests for extensions or expansions of previously-granted exemptions, with a heavy emphasis on decrypting DVDs and other protected formats for educational use and uses otherwise covered under Fair Use.
A few of the new requests bear looking into. I wholeheartedly applaud this one, which appears to seek permission to execute vigilante vivisection against the most craptastic copy-protection schemes currently in use. Meanwhile, Linux devotees who think the rules don't apply to them are getting a little tiresome.
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