Every three years, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress meets to determine exceptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What’s anti-circumvention? It’s the part of the US digital copyright law that prohibits breaking digital locks on content, such as DRM and content scrambling. Typically, breaking these locks is a federal offense—even if the locks are being broken in the service of a perfectly legal creative process, like video remix.
Yesterday morning, the Librarian of Congress issued its ruling to announce several important (and broad) exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The Register of Copyrights and Librarian of Congress designated six particular exemptions, though the first has the most direct effect on video creators:
(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:
(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos
In other words, college professors, film and media studies students, documentarians, and noncommercial artists can now legally use technology like Handbrake to bypass DVD encryption systems and capture sample video clips.
Though this is a huge and welcome step in the right direction, the ruling limits the excerpts to “short portions”—a purposely undefined term that implies fairly short clips—and is a sort of last resort exception; users can rip DVDs if utilizing another method, such as filming a screen, is reasonably out of the question (MPAA argued against this ripping in its presentation to the copyright office last year, claiming that educators should instead record clips off a TV screen with a videocamera). The ruling also only covers “criticism or comment,” just two of the factors that tend to characterize fair use (news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research are a bit more attenuated). Though the noncommercial exemption tends to cover most instances related to online and educational video, many people were left out of this group of exempted users.
Other major exemptions announced this week permit the jailbreaking of smartphones (such as the iPhone) to allow for external applications and the connection to other wireless networks; bypassing video game DRM for security research; bypassing encryption on computer programs protected by obsolete dongles; and circumvention of ebook DRM for text-to-speech purposes when no other text-to-speech alternative is available.
Requests that were considered but not approved included bypassing DRM on streaming video, bypassing CSS on DVDs in order to play on Linux machines, and bypassing DRM on media and software that depends on an authentication server that has been disabled.
These changes are great news, though their limitations are evident. And Linux users are still treated as second-class consumers of media. Still, it will be interesting to see how these rules play out until the next DMCA review three years from now.
For further reading, this quick piece by Nick Bramble, fellow at the Yale ISP, brings up further questions and calls for explanations regarding many of the changes. Read EFF’s press release here.
Check out the official, longer description (pdf) for explanations behind the ruling.
Photo by 37Hz on flickr
