30 July 2010

The Librarian of Congress has announced 6 new categories of exemption from the prohibitions under US law against circumventing DRM mechanisms (what we call TPM and ERMI).

The (Australian) Copyright Council has a nice bullet point summary.

Jonathon Bailey, at Plagiarism Today, looks at the politics and the ramifications from a practical perspective. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t spend a fair bit of time on the issue in his weekly podcast, so check back to his site on, say, Monday.

Now, the Librarian of Congress’ exemptions are applicable under US law only. Our law does contemplate the introduction of additional, so-called “ad hoc” exemptions against circumventing access control tpm, by means of the Regulations: s 116AN(9), Sch. 10A of the regs has 6 nice categories of exemption. These were added way back in 2006 around the time we had a review to find out if we should have some more. Wonder if someone, somewhere is thinking we should investigate some more?