The Bizarre Process Used For Approving Exemptions To the DMCA

harrymcc writes: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act imposes severe penalties on those who overcome copy-protection technologies. It allows for exemptions for a variety of purposes — but in a weird proviso, those exemptions must be re-approved by the Librarian of Congress every three years. Over at Fast Company, Glenn Fleishman takes a look at this broken system and why it's so bad for our rights as consumers. "The Librarian has opted to require one or more 'champions' or proponents of a carefully defined category, like "Audiovisual works – educational uses – colleges and universities," to file a brief. His office also opens the floor to rebuttals from opponents. Further, the Librarian sunsets every exemption every three years—something not required by the law, and which requires champions to arise again to launch a new defense. The office also doesn't propose its own examples of circumvention that should be permitted, even though the law permits it to do so."

Comments

Why doesn't 1201-a-1-A nullify itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no lawyer but section 1201-a-1-A readS:
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter. "

Personally I'm shocked nobody has ever tried to defend a DMCA decryption request on the grounds that the control does not 'effectively' control access to the work, because it is easily broken. Something can't 'effectively control access' if it is not actually successful in doing so. This provision reads like 'It's illegal to bypass something that nobody has been able to bypass', at which point the act of successfully bypassing it would make the bypassing itself legal...... ... ok, maybe it's a good thing legislatures don't think recursively, but still...

Re:Sunset provisions are good.

[davester666]

It's almost as if the industry wrote the law and is responsible for directing the government as to how to enforce it.