EFF gives up fight for Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 2 Dec 2005 at 12:39

A leading US digital rights body has given up on the US Copyright Office, saying that every proposed exception to the DMCA has been rebuffed, rendering the 'three-year exemption' period meaningless.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act includes provision for a tri-ennial rulemaking period, whereby interested parties can propose exemptions to the legislation: i.e. practices and circumstances that should continue to be allowed, despite infringing the act. It can be seen as an effort to mitigate an otherwise draconian law.

However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that in each three-year period in which it has participated, each and every one of its proposed exemptions has been turned down and is withdrawing from the process.

'When the Copyright Office is unwilling to grant a DMCA exemption that would allow consumers to play copy-protected CDs on their computers, you know the rulemaking process is failing digital media consumers,' said Fred von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney with EFF. 'In the wake of the Sony BMG DRM debacle, it's time for Congress get involved on behalf of American consumers.'

In previous periods, the EFF has proposed that DVD owners be allowed to skip the 'unskippable' ads at the beginning of DVDs; that people who bought copy-protected CDs be allowed to get them to play on their computer; and that consumers be allowed to bypass region coding to play a DVD purchased in another part of the world.

However, it says the Copyright Office's response has been that these situations merely inconvenienced consumers rather than denying them rights of usage they would otherwise enjoy: the region coding problem can easily be overcome by buying a DVD player from each country; at least CDs that don't work in a computer still work in a CD player, and so on.

It also says that the exemption structure only allows for cases where infringement should be allowed to go unpunished, but does not include the powers to legalise the tools that may be needed to enable the cases in the first place.

The EFF has released a paper 'DMCA Triennial Rulemaking: Failing Consumers Completely' on its website.