Format-shifting DRM circumvention allowed by New Zealand DMCA: Time for U.S. to do the same?
“Unlike the DMCA in the U.S., the new law allows people to bypass DRM if the intended use is legitimate, it explicitly allows format shifting and timeshifting, and it refuses to protect region-coding of movies and games.”- Nate Anderson, in Ars Technica, writing on New Zealand’s variant of the American DMCA.
The TeleRead take: Do any TeleBlog readers have connections to relevant congressional committees and presidential campaigns? While repeal of the U.S. DMCA is unlikely, can’t something be done to legalize circumvention for format shifting—so that, for example, Cybook owners can enjoy Sony Reader-format books and vice versa? Meanwhile the present DMCA continues to serve as less of a protector of intellectual property than of proprietary technology in e-bookdom and other areas. Image is of an anti-DRM protest here in the States.
Related: Techmeme news roundup, including posts, as of now, in Boing Boing and Michael Geist’s Blog. Prof. Geist, teaching law at the University of Ottawa, apparently broke the story in North America. A major development! PDF of New Zealand law is here.
Important caveat: I have not read the law yet, and I’m not a lawyer anyway, but I would call attention to Michael Geist’s observation that “most importantly, the law clearly permits circumvention for ‘permitted acts,’ which effectively preserves fair dealing rights (the statute also specifies the right to circumvent for encryption research).
“More impressive, the law includes a system to facilitate circumvention for permitted acts in the event that users are unable to circumvent a TPM themselves. In such cases, the law allows a ‘qualified person,’ which includes librarians, archivists, and educational institutions, to circumvent a TPM on behalf of a user (the user can also ask the copyright owner to unlock the work for them).”
OK, now let’s parse the actual law’s language and see what it could mean or not mean for both libraries and users, including those using e-books directly rather than through libraries.
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