The American Library Association and four other library groups filed a request with the U.S. Copyright Office December 18 for permission to circumvent digital-copy-protection technologies under limited circumstances.
The request was made under the rulemaking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which call for a review of the act’s prohibitions every three years. It asks for an exemption for e-books and other works that are blocked by measures prohibiting access by disabled persons using text-to-speech or text-to-Braille devices.
ALA Legislative Counsel Miriam Nisbet said she did not expect the Copyright Office to grant the request. In comments accompanying the request, the groups state that their “frank assessment” is that the rulemaking regulation “offers little promise of meaningful relief from the genuinely adverse effects of the statutory prohibition.” They add that they are submitting “only modest proposals” because their more ambitious requests were rejected in the first rulemaking three years ago.
The groups also call for the renewal of two exemptions granted in 2000: for malfunctioning, damaged, or obsolete copy-protection devices; and for lists of Web sites blocked by filtering software.
The request was filed by ALA, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association.
Posted December 23, 2002.