The new rule will allow people to modify automobile software for purposes of research, maintenance, or fix.
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The Library of Congress has powers related to copyright protection, including the right to make exemptions to DMCA.
Smartphone users may also continue to jailbreak their handsets.
This provision “prohibits circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works, codified in Section 1201(a)(1) of title 17 of the United States Code”. At the same time, after our initial reading of the rule, we are concerned that a few limitations on the security research exemption are unwarranted and will unduly limit its effectiveness.
It’s an obscure provision of a relatively obscure law, overseen, rather unpredictably, by the Librarian of Congress.
“This “access control” rule is supposed to protect against unlawful copying”, Kit Walsh, an EFF staff attorney, said in a statement.
The Librarian granted part of EFF’s new proposal for an exemption to preserve abandoned video games.
Regarding the second exemption for preservation, the Librarian of Congress put forth a similar exemption that allows publicly-accessible museums, libraries and archives to circumvent DRM on games where the single player components have been disabled because an authentication server has been taken offline (also similarly, the exemption doesn’t apply to multiplayer aspects). Responsible researchers often contact companies to inform them of these vulnerabilities so that the companies can voluntarily make their cars safer. The decision comes thanks to a concerted effort from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed for two exemptions that coincided with the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
The exemption will allow owners of cars and agricultural equipment to access software in their vehicles for diagnosis, fix or modification – as long as the alterations don’t violate regular copyright or other laws and don’t meddle with controls of telematics and entertainment systems. “It’s unfortunate, and I’m not sure it’s necessary”, Stallman told us.
Movie and TV studios had opposed efforts to expand those exemptions, including to Blu-Ray discs and a few online educational uses, arguing that other formats are sufficiently high resolution in the case of Blu-Rays, and that an exemption for online educational courses “would allow widespread distribution of works over the Internet”.
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One of the campaigners for the [car] exemption…raised concerns [that] the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act…could still be used to aggressively pursue good-guy hackers, and that the exemptions only lasted three years; a “ridiculous system”, said [the] EFF. We are pleased that today’s ruling protects against damaging expansions into space- and format-shifting, and will further encourage the development of new, legal platforms.
