Cell Phone Owners Allowed To Break Software Locks

An anonymous reader writes "The library of congress approved many copyright exemptions today. Among the exemptions were new rules about cell phones, DVDs, and electronic books." From the article: "Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday. Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books. All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years. In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren't able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones' underlying programs."

Comments

Re:How about not treating me like a criminal in th

[mr_matticus]

"And where, pray tell, would this recording come from? All would be fine and dandy if the original master recording is still around. But for all we know, the company having done such recording may long have gone bust, or they might still be around, but unwilling to provide it for whatever reason."

Where would the master go? Are you really worried that something is going to disappear overnight? How many works of art or entertainment do you know in the modern age that are made with a single copy of a master? (Almost none) How many defunct companies have come and gone while we still retain masters of all of them? (Almost all of them). If someone won't provide a DRM-free version of a public domain work, sue them. That's actually one of the good causes for a lawsuit--it's public domain, the old rightsholder has no right to withhold it once copyright expires.

I think you grossly overestimate both the probability of loss and technical difficulty of keeping even the DRMed copies accessible into the future. Preserving interoperability with major DRM schemes is just one of many facets of digital archiving