It's Time To End The Anti-Circumvention Exemption Circus

It's Time To End The Anti-Circumvention Exemption Circus

3 years ago
Anonymous $FNmJglWnLu

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211110/23455847921/time-to-end-anti-circumvention-exemption-circus.shtml

Copyright as we know it goes back to the Statute of Anne of 1710. A law that old is clearly going to struggle to cope with the enormous changes in technology that have taken place since then – notably the Internet. But even relatively recent copyright laws were framed in ways that have become unworkable for the digital world we live in.

For example, arguably one of the most important pieces of recent legislation in this area is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the US, and its sibling, the EU's Copyright Directive (EUCD). Both are wide-ranging, affecting many aspects of copyright, and a particularly problematic aspect of both concerns anti-circumvention. The DMCA and EUCD prohibit the bypassing of any "technical protection measure" (TPM) used to protect works under copyright. That typically means the much-hated Digital Rights Management (DRM), which aims to control who can do what with copyright material, and thus often gets in the way of people enjoying material that they have paid for.