Thanks to James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, all the US residents will be permitted to break the software locks on their mobile phones whenever they desire without the fear to be legally prosecuted by any district attorneys. The US Copyright Office new exemptions will also allow the users of any carrier to move to another carrier of their choice by unblocking their handsets.

Fred von Lohmann, which is an attorney associated with the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that "I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers and computer security experts. I'm surprised and pleased they were granted" but also that they have also rejected other exemptions that would have been more than useful to the general public, one of them approving the legal copying of movies on DVDs to be used on the Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod multimedia player and to a number of other music players.

Some other new rights issued by the Copyright Office will let film professors make educational compilations by copying snippets of DVDs and use especially designed software to let blind people read copy-protected e-books.

All the new exemptions approved are going to be effective beginning with November 27th 2006 and will expire three years from the starting date.