DMCA comments published

THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS resides in the US Library of Congress and has public rulemaking authority over copyright enforcement for all types of media -- all books, periodicals, plays, music, films, etc.

In that role, the Library of Congress lately solicited public comments on legitimate exceptions it should recognize to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Well, they received quite a few comments and have now published them.

The DMCA, one might recall, is that draconian law purchased by the major media conglomerates to extend their monopolies on music and movies right into your personal life, a step on the path to universal pay-per-use.

It's the law Russian programmer Dimitri Sklyarov was arrested for having allegedly broken -- even though he wrote his program in Russia, where it was perfectly legal. His employer, Elcomsoft, was recently tried instead under the criminal provisions of the DMCA and... they were acquitted.

A summary of media coverage about Sklyarov's detention by the FBI's DMCA stormtroopers and the eventual Elcomsoft trial has been cobbled together by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) here.

The DMCA was also the spiked cudgel brandished by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to force the Norwegian prosecution of the young teen Jon Johansen -- under a burglary statute no less -- for having written the DVD descrambling program DeCSS just so he could view his own, legally purchased DVDs under Linux, using the LiViD player.

A description of that case written by the EFF is here and a ZDnet-UK news item reporting the trial's recent end (but not the result, which isn't announced yet) is here.

These DMCA public comments submitted to the Register of Copyrights make interesting reading. Most of the comments request specific exemptions, yet others are more general. Some representative examples -- greatly excerpted and abridged -- include the following:

"The DMCA's prohibition on circumventing access to... DVDs unduly inhibits workers engaged in the production of audiovisual works... from being able to engage in the practice... of compiling portfolios or demo reels... to secure employment." (#1)

"Access to material in the public domain needs to be assured, even if the publisher restricts access by technological mechanisms used also for copyrighted works." (#2)

"Researchers need to be able to publish details of security holes in and fixes to open-source software in order to provide for a timely resolution of security and other problems." (#3)

"Music... should be exempted for all personal uses involving medium transfer or backup archival methods ... so long as such transfer is limited to non-commercial uses and is not intended to be resold except as constitutionally guaranteed irony, parody, or collage... uses." (#6)

"We need to ensure an individual's access to works they create or purchase." (#8)

"...The prohibition on circumvention affects the ability of computer security specialists to determine what is or is not Spyware and what information has been compromised." (#14)

"...encryption needs to be circumvented due to unavailability of password(s) caused by absence, death, or termination." (#18)

"...When copyright holders consent to relinquish revenue, or consent to open access, then the copyright statute should not stand in their way." (#22)

"I believe there now exists a very real danger of losing data due to obsolete software or even file format versions." (#23)

"...Without the ability to circumvent access controls in order to access archived reproductions, we have no way of ensuring this essential non-infringing use, and these works will vanish from the historical record of the 21st century." (#25)

"The American Foundation for the Blind proposes an exemption for the class of works defined as 'literary.'" (#26)

"Studies of censorware blacklists are vastly hindered by not being able to access those blacklists." (#31)

"...the goals of copyright are not advanced when copyright holders are permitted to leverage their lawful copyright monopolies into control over which computer operating systems, browsers, media players, codecs or digital rights management systems must be used by those exercising licensed exclusive rights of reproduction or public performance or, worse, by those exercising rights that have never belonged to the copyright holder, such as the right to perform a work privately." (#34)

"...if I buy a compact disc, it should be within my rights to make a copy for my cassette player, my .mp3 player, or any other format for which I own the hardware. Trying to prevent such use infringes on my property and privacy rights. The section must be reworked to cover only cases where actual piracy, the resale of such copies, is attempted." (#39)

"The [DMCA] interferes with many legal, non-infringing uses of digital computing and prevents scientists and technologists from circumventing access technologies in order to recognize shortcomings in security systems, to defend patents and copyrights, to discover and fix dangerous bugs in code, or to conduct forms of desired educational activities." (#40)

"The DMCA gives too much power to copyright holders, allowing them to accuse you and have your internet access cut off, without a trial or proof. You can also be held liable for even discussing defeating copy protection, or for defeating copy protection that would otherwise be legal. In other industries this isn't tolerated[:] you cannot be arrested for owning a set of lockpicks, for breaking into your own car, or telling someone how a lock works in an academic text." (#43)

The Library of Congress published only 50 comments, which is a suspect round number. It's not clear whether that's all the comments received, the ones they thought most representative, or some arbitrary subset.

Lest Europeans think the DMCA is an exclusively American power-grab by Big Media, they might recall the EU Copyright Directive, a parallel to US DMCA pressed forward by the same international media conglomerates, in the interest of conforming copyright under European jurisdiction.

It's also true that so far the only "criminals" prosecuted under the DMCA or otherwise at the behest of Big Media have been... Europeans.

The DMCA public comments are up on the US Library of Congress website here. µ