EFF Backs Senate Judiciary Leaders' Request for Copyright Study on 'Software-Enabled Devices'
The Electronic Frontier Foundation praised Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Friday for requesting a Copyright Office study of the role of copyright law on the use of “software-enabled devices.” EFF said that issue is “crucial because technology and the law have…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
evolved in a way that no one could have intended when Congress wrote the present copyright laws.” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante in a letter Thursday that “this is a complex field, and how we interact with software in our products touches on numerous important policy arenas, including intellectual property, privacy, consumer protection, public safety, cybersecurity, competition, and the evolution of the digital marketplace.” The CO should “undertake a comprehensive review of the role of copyright in the complex set of relationships at the heart of these issues,” Grassley and Leahy wrote. That review should examine how legitimate usage of software-enabled products is affected by existing copyright law, how innovation is affected by those provisions and what changes to copyright law would affect the creation and use of software-enabled products, Grassley and Leahy said. The CO said Friday it’s “pleased” to have received Senate Judiciary’s study request and “will ask for public input to ensure that the Office’s report considers the views of all in the copyright community, including copyright owners and public interest groups.” The CO is expected Wednesday to release its ruling on proposed exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 1201’s ban on the circumvention of technological protection measures. EFF, which has advocated for several of the 27 proposed exemptions under review as part of CO’s triennial Section 1201 exemptions rulemaking process, said it believes Section 1201 “has restricted customers’ freedoms to repair, understand, and improve on the devices they buy.” EFF said it believes “there is already an extensive record establishing the need to rein in Section 1201, to protect device owners from copyright abuse enabled by end-user license ‘agreements,’ and to pass other reforms that would generally improve copyright law such as reducing statutory damages and the length of time that copyrights remain in force.”