At the end of July, the Library of Congress announced the new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Pursuant to Section 1201(a)(1) of the DMCA, the librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, is required to determine whether there are any classes of copyrightable works that will be subject to exemptions from the “statute’s prohibition against circumvention of technology that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work.” (See July 26, 2010, Statement of the Library of Congress on the Anticircumvention Rulemaking.)
As Billington noted in his statement regarding the new DMCA exemptions, “The purpose of the proceeding is to determine whether current technologies that control access to copyrighted works are diminishing the ability of individuals to use works in lawful, non-infringing ways.” The librarian of Congress, upon the recommendation of Marybeth Peters, register of copyrights, identified exemptions for six classes of works.
