EFF Pushes to Widen Scope of Jailbreak Legalty

In a letter to the U.S. Copyright Office, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the regulatory body to renew and expand the critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) noting that the matter has since evolved.

Granted last year in response to EFF's requests to protect the rights of American consumers who modify electronic gadgets and make artistic works, these DMCA exemptions enable “hobbyists and tinkerers” to come up with innovations that, under the current legislature, may be suppressed.

The EFF thus “asked the Copyright Office to protect the ‘jailbreaking’ of smartphones, electronic tablets, and video game consoles – liberating them to run operating systems and applications from any source, not just those approved by the manufacturer." (emphasis ours)

The EFF also asked the Office to protect artists and critics who create new, remixed works using excerpts from DVDs or downloading services.

The filings can be found here in PDF format (tweeted by iOS hacker Musclenerd).

"The DMCA is supposed to block copyright infringement. But instead it can be misused to threaten creators, innovators, and consumers, discouraging them from making full and fair use of their own property," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry.

"Hobbyists and tinkerers who want to modify their phones or video game consoles to run software programs of their choice deserve protection under the law. So do artists and critics who use short excerpts of video content to create new works of commentary and criticism. Copyright law shouldn't be stifling such uses – it should be encouraging them," added McSherry.

"We were thrilled that EFF won important exemptions to the DMCA in the last rulemaking," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "But technology has evolved over the last three years, and so it's important to expand these exemptions to cover the real-world uses of smartphones, tablets, video game consoles, DVDs, and video downloads."

The hearings on the proposed DMCA exemptions will be held in the spring of 2012. October 2012 will see the final rulemaking order take place, said the EFF.