Greetings Colleagues!
A small team of digital stewardship practitioners, lawyers, and law students is working on an important legal project, and we need your help to learn more about software preservation and hacking/cracking/circumventing digital rights management (DRM). Please read on, and take a moment to share any info you can using the Google Form linked to below.
As you may know, the Copyright Act includes a provision that prohibits circumvention of effective technological protection measures that control access to an in-copyright work. In other words, the law bars using hacks and other tools to defeat encryption or other technological ways of controlling access/use of copyrighted works, a category that includes software.
Luckily, every three years the Copyright Office engages in a rule making process to determine whether to grant temporary exemptions to that prohibition. The Office is looking for lawful activities that are unduly discouraged by the law. To support a request for an expanded software preservation exemption, we need information about the nature and extent of the difficulty that libraries and others face in preserving software that is protected by TPMs.
As you may know, an exemption was granted in the last cycle for preservation of video games, and the ALA and ARL have requested a renewal of that exemption. We are seeking an expansion of that exemption to cover all software, but we need to learn more about what kinds of software may be affected.
If you’d like to help, please visit this Google Form and share information about software preservation challenges posed by the legal prohibition on tampering with TPMs: https://goo.gl/forms/h1s1NdjEahY9Ckgm1.
Thanks,
Brandon Butler
Director of Information Policy, University of Virginia Libraries
--
Jessica Meyerson
Research Program Officer
Educopia Institute
Working from Austin, TX
