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July 26, 2010, 05:40 PM ET

Go Ahead, Jailbreak Your Smartphone

The Library of Congress shook up the copyright world today with a major new round of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Every three years, the librarian of Congress issues a list of what's exempted from the statute's ban on circumventing the digital-rights management technology that controls access to copyrighted material. In today's statement, James Billington, the librarian, listed six classes of works that will be subject to exemptions, depending on what users want to do with them.

The six classes include motion pictures on DVD's, as long as they're "legally made and acquired" and as long as the circumventing is done for educational, documentary, or nonprofit uses. That gives the green light to professors or film/media-studies students who want to incorporate "short portions of new movies into short works for the purpose of criticism or comment," Mr. Billington's statement said.

Another category now subject to exemptions from the DMCA ban is e-books. Users may work around e-books' access-control technology if it prevents them from enabling the read-aloud function or from putting the text into a specialized reading format.

Mr. Billington's statement also listed computer programs that allow smartphones "to execute software applications." If the user wants to circumvent those programs in order to get legally obtained applications to work together, that's now all right, the statement said. Observers concluded that jailbreaking an iPhone—getting the device to run applications not sanctioned by the manufacturer—is no longer verboten.

The Ars Technica blog concluded that "Apple loses big" under the new exemptions. "This time, the library went (comparatively) nuts," it said, "allowing widespread bypassing of the CSS encryption on DVD's, declaring iPhone jailbreaking to be 'fair use,' and letting consumers crack their legally purchased e-books in order to have them read aloud by computers."

Watch for reactions from smartphone manufacturers and from publishers. Meanwhile, advocates for less-restrictive digital-rights management celebrated the announcement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which lobbied for some of the new exemptions, posted a statement celebrating what it called "new legal protections for video artists, cellphone jailbreakers, and unlockers."

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Comments

1. droslovinia - July 27, 2010 at 08:37 am

Did we miss something here? A couple of weeks ago, the tech media was abuzz at the hardware restrictions that Motorola put on its newest Droid phone in order to prevent jailbreaking, and now jailbreaking is unique to iPhones again? I don't have either kind of phone yet, but with all this duoblespeak, it's getting harder to make an informed choice.

2. cavon - July 27, 2010 at 10:03 am

Solid move in the right direction. Bravo, Library of Congress.
Now I can choose to have a managed user experience in a sealed ecosystem.

3. panacea - July 27, 2010 at 02:29 pm

Jailbreaking is most commonly associated with the iPhone, but not unique to it.

The new exemptions cover phones running the Android OS (such as Motorola Droid phones) as well.

4. aluxeterna - July 27, 2010 at 05:23 pm

If the LoC has to go back and re-permit activities as exempt from the law, then the DMCA is written much too broadly, criminalizing activities that have no business being illegal.

I suppose that's what we get when we let the corporations craft legislation.

5. performance_expert2 - July 28, 2010 at 03:10 am

This is good and important news. Obama is shepharding a few initiatives. This and that pebble in the water re: healthcare. Which reminds me, even though I pay for it.. still having trouble with access to services.. Corporate Rationing Binary: ON.

I wish his wife hadn't just combined an invitation to digitally sign his Aug. 4 birthday card with an immediate demand for money.

6. 11159995 - July 29, 2010 at 02:37 pm

I'm wondering if EFF will help us publishers out when users bypass DRM in e-books and then make them available through P2P file-sharing? Nope, I didn't think so. Groups like EFF and Public Knowledge profess to respect copyright, but you never see them challenging any abuses of it that result in substantial loses to publishers.---Sandy Thatcher

7. johnadkins - July 29, 2010 at 04:34 pm

@Sandy Thatcher - It is not the role of the EFF to pursue copyright infringers. It is the role of the justice system and the publishers to do so. One role of the EFF is to make certain that folks are able to exercise the rights that they have under free use. Publishers and other content creators need to realize that they have gone too far in pushing through abusive copyright legislation and work with organizations like the EFF to make content reasonably available while allowing creators to profit from their work.

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10. ugg123456789 - August 11, 2010 at 01:46 am

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