DivaBlog

For several months there has been work going on at Sun to decide what our policy should be on Digital Rights Management (aka DRM) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (aka the DMCA). Yesterday we finally saw some fruit from that effort in the form of a story that Sun and others are supporting Senator Boucher's bill to amend the DMCA to allow circumvention of copy protections so long as copyright isn't being violated.

I've heard Larry Lessig say that unchecked erosion of the Fair Use provisions in the Copyright Act should be one of the greatest concerns of people who care about technology (not to mention consumers). But the issue won't be visible to most people until VCRs stop being able to copy their favorite TV programs off a digitial cable feed with DRM. Making copies of purchased content for personal use or convenience used to be considered Fair Use (before such content was digitized and before the DMCA said that defeating digital copy protection was illegal). Looks like Boucher's bill would partially fix this problem, although not surprisingly there are some concessions to the entertainment industry.