What the copyright ruling means — from InsideHigherEd.com by Tracy Mitrano
A new ruling from the United States Copyright Office that is making the rounds in higher education and blogosphere circles has a simple core meaning: fair use now applies to section 1200 of the DMCA, the anti-circumvention provision.
As far back as Princeton’s Edward Felton’s challenge to content owners from the computer science and engineering perspective and Berkeley’s Pamela Samuelson from the legal arena, this question has remained open. Early to identify the issue and its potential deleterious effects that this unanswered question had on innovation and science, these academic leaders were soon supported by William Fisher, John Palfrey and William McGreveran. In a white paper they and others at the Berkman Center published in 2006,The Digital Learning Challenge, they specifically spoke to the effects that the absence of a clear ruling on this question was having on teaching and learning: for fear of violating copyright many film instructors, professors in other areas and students restricted their use of materials they believed to be in the service of fulfilling teaching missions.
The question, essentially, was: did the breaking of encryption on a DVD for a fair use of the content violate copyright law?
The answer is now “no.”
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