After the U.S. Copyright Office’s once-every-three-years review of allowed exemptions, “We have some good news to share….” reads a new announcement this week from the Free Software Foundation:
The FSF was one of several activist organizations pushing for exemptions to the anticircumvention rules under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that make breaking Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) illegal, even for ethical and legitimate purposes. We helped bring public awareness to a process that is too often only a conversation between lawyers and bureaucrats.
As of late last week, there are now multiple new exemptions that will help ease some of the acute abuse DRM inflicts on users.
However, the main lesson to be learned here is that we should and must keep pushing. Individual, specific exemptions are not enough. The entire anticircumvention law needs to be repealed. We want to thank the 230 individuals who co-signed their names to our comments