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New Anti-Circumvention Rulemaking Coming Soon
zurab writes "According to CNet, copyright regulators are considering a rare public comment (pdf) process on the controversial DMCA law. The article states they are mostly looking for what kind of exceptions they should make to the law." If you recall, the Librarian of Congress is required by law to conduct a review process every three years to see if there are any specific types of works which should be exempted from part of the DMCA. You can see loc.gov for some information about the current and previous rulemaking procedures, and this piece I wrote after the last rulemaking was finished, examining what did and didn't work to convince the bureaucrats.
Why not? Don't be brainwashed into this thinking by the big media companies. It is only illegal under the dmca to reverse engineer something. Ms does not own your motherboard or xbox after you purchase it. You do.
Could you clone it? No, that would be fraud and the hardware may be copyrighted.
But you can do whatever it is you want this it.
Copyright laws today give patent like powers to copyright holders which is wrong. I think its bs that a company can claim to own someting you bought. The dmca gives them these powers. It gives them a limited set of rules that a consumer can't do.
Also if it were actually illegal to reverse engineer hardware, then all computers except IBM's would be illegal.
After all compaq must of broken the law by writing their own bios and creating the first pc clone. Right?
http://saveie6.com/
Like the typical American consumer, I've never run in to a problem with regional coding. All the DVDs I buy from the store work just fine in my DVD player and on my computer. I can understand how this can be frustrating if you want to watch imported DVDs, but as you said, they WILL work on an imported DVD player.
As a European consumer it's even easier. I can use the same player for DVDs regardless of their source or encoding.
I think it is the intent and direction of these laws that people have a problem with. The fact that their success rate is only very marginally better than zero is no reason not to worry that laws have been introduced to empower a cartel.
It annoys me greatly when someone tells me the DMCA contains an exemption for scientists. This supposed exemption is an extremely thin, virtually nonexistent concession to the scientific community.
Aside from being limited to "encryption research" (only one component of security research, which did not cover the SDMI researchers,) the exemption contains a ridiculous requirement that scientists first ask permission from companies before collecting data or performing experiments---data which, coincidentally, might embarrass those companies. Is there any good reason why third parties should have themselves written into the scientific method?
Another major problem with the exemption: it only permits one step in the scientific process, the actual collection of data, the act of circumventing a DRM system. The next step, publishing or sharing that data with the scientific community, doesn't seem to be exempted, and has been the target of legal disputes in the past.
What I'd like to see: an exemption for the entire scientific method, which doesn't require the scientific community to be restructured or centralized or authorized by an entertainment industry or any other arbitrary group who can write laws.
Please read the PDF the LOC has provided. They state clearly their mandate from congress and what arguments might sway them.
The LOC doesn't give two rats whiskers about the constitutionality of the law. Do not write to them about the constitutionality of the law. They have one mandate, and that is to examine if there are "classes of works" for which enforcement of the DMCA would "substantially harm" legitimate, non-infringing use of those classes of works.
The legal battles to have the law overturned as unconstitutional are a logically seperate issue from what the LOC rules. If the LOC exempts certain classes of works (as it has already two), then either the law will be declared unconstitutional for another reason or enough works will be exempted (due to legitimate argumentation from interested/harmed parties) that the DMCA will be unenforceable by its own mandate.
The best solution would be to argue to the LOC according to its terms, conceding its strict mandate and forming coherent reasons that everything worthwhile should be exempt (one class at a time, like the PDF requests), and fight the battle of unconstitutionality in the courts. Any spurious assertions or argumentation will be posted on the LOC's webpage, but nobody will read past the first paragraph.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.