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1 days and 11 hours ago
An anonymous reader writes "For copyright activists, Christmas comes but once every three years: a
chance to ask Santa for a new exemption to the much-hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act's
prohibitions against hacking, reverse engineering and evasion of Digital Rights Management (DRM)
schemes protecting all kinds of digital works and electronic items. Judging from the list of 20
exemptions requested this year [19 shown], some in the cyber-law community are thinking big. The
requests include the right to legally jailbreak iPhones in order to use third party software,
university professors wishing to rip clips from DVDs for classroom use, YouTube users wishing to
rip DVDs to make video mashups, a request to allow users to hack DRM protecting content from stores
that have gone bankrupt or shut down, and a request to allow security researchers to reverse
engineer video games with security flaws that put end-users at risk." Reader MistaE provides some
more specific links to PDF versions: "Among the exemption proposals is a request from the Harvard
Cyberlaw Clinic to allow circumvention of DRM protection when the central authorization server goes
down, a request from the EFF to allow circumvention to install third party programs on phones, as
well as a request for ripping DVDs for non-commercial purposes. There were also several narrow
requests from educational institutions to rip DVDs for classroom practices."pa
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