Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

Might we see a DMCA exception?

An interesting result of the Sony rootkit fiasco was published on Slashdot and I‘d like to point it out again. A group of researchers are asking the Copyright Office for an exemption to the DMCA in order to publish notice in the future of vulnerabilities and exploits such as what happened with the Sony rootkit. Spyware has suddenly become a justification for circumventing protection technologies - how ironic. What’s even better is the researchers have a corporate backer creating a legitimate justification - Sony!

They only request exemption for a single class § 1201(A)(1)(a) for sound recordings and audiovisual works distributed in compact disc format. So the exemption wouldn’t apply to all works in general, but hey, with the DMCA any crack is a start.