According to this article, the U.S. Copyright Office has issued new exemptions to the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Cell phone owners can now break locks to use their handsets with competing carriers, while film professors have the right to copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations...
Other rights declared in the government's triennial review of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act seek to improve access for the blind and to obsolete works and let security researchers try to break copy-protection technologies embedded in CDs.
Unfortunately for consumers, the Copyright Office "rejected a number of exemptions that could have benefited consumers, including one that would let owners of DVDs legally copy movies for use on Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and other music players." In other words, the types of uses that consumers desire when they purchase DVDs and CDs.
I truly despise the DMCA for its obliteration of fair use and its intrusion into consumers' rights. If I buy 10 CDs and then burn songs from each of those onto a different CD, I don't think that's a copyright infringement. But the music industry does, and they want to keep you from doing it. And the fact that the encryption on DVDs and CDs doesn't expire means that the copyright owners have a permanent injunction against copying, something which completely defies the purpose of allowing copyrights in the first place. While our liberal friends are complaining about big business, why not add the music, recording, and film industries to the list?
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