Library of Congress on DMCA, Copyright Law Troubles
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 07:43:23 -0700
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/library-congress-dmca-copyright-law-troubles
July 17th, 2008
Library of Congress on DMCA, Copyright Law Troubles
Posted by Hugh D'Andrade
The chorus of voices criticizing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
(DMCA) has just gotten a bit louder with the addition of a new and
authoritative voice: The Library of Congress. In a new report, jointly
released with the U.K.'s Joint Information Systems Committee,
Australia's Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project, and the
Netherlands' SURFfoundation, the Library of Congress' National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program points out that
the work of preserving, documenting and archiving the nation's
intellectual output is made unnecessarily difficult by antiquated
copyright law exceptions and limitations, and TPM (technological
protection measure) laws designed to restrict the making of digital
copies.
ArsTechnica has a review of the report, citing the many absurd
paradoxes of trying to make archival copies in a legal environment
that views copying as a suspicious and possibly illegal act. The DMCA,
for example, bans not just the act of circumventing DRM copy
restrictions, but also the sale or trafficking in the software or
tools that enable circumvention. And while the Librarian of Congress
is authorized to craft exemptions under appropriate circumstances to
the DMCA's ban on circumvention, there wouldn't be much of a market
for tools to accomplish that circumvention, since only those who fall
within an exemption could use them. So even if libraries were granted
an exemption from the ban on circumvention for the purposes of digital
archiving, they might well be unable to obtain the tools to do so —
because they would still generally be illegal.
The report was released the day before a WIPO seminar on Digital
Preservation and Copyright issues. In the international context, it is
worth noting that some countries have adopted a more forward-looking
approach to laws regulating technological protection measures than the
inflexible DMCA. One example is New Zealand's recently revised
Copyright Law (PDF), which permits libraries and archives to access
circumvention tools to circumvent TPMs on behalf of end users if the
TPMs interfere with non-copyright infringing uses.
ArsTechnica cites these other examples: