[Rdap] PLEASE READ: Information Needed re Technical Measures That Block Software Preservation

[Jessica Meyerson]

Greetings Colleagues!

A small team of digital stewardship practitioners, lawyers, and law
students is working on an important legal project, and we need your help to
learn more about software preservation and hacking/cracking/circumventing
digital rights management (DRM). *Please read on, and take a moment to
share any info you can using the Google Form linked to below.*

As you may know, the Copyright Act includes a provision that prohibits
circumvention of effective technological protection measures that control
access to an in-copyright work. In other words, the law bars using hacks
and other tools to defeat encryption or other technological ways of
controlling access/use of copyrighted works, a category that includes
software.

Luckily, every three years the Copyright Office engages in a rule making
process <https://copyright.gov/1201/> to determine whether to grant
temporary exemptions to that prohibition. The Office is looking for lawful
activities that are unduly discouraged by the law. To support a request for
an expanded software preservation exemption, we need information about the
nature and extent of the difficulty that libraries and others face in
preserving software that is protected by TPMs.

As you may know, an exemption was granted in the last cycle for
preservation of video games, and the ALA and ARL have requested a renewal
of that exemption. We are seeking an expansion of that exemption to cover
all software, but we need to learn more about what kinds of software may be
affected.

If you’d like to help, *please visit this Google Form and share information
about software preservation challenges posed by the legal prohibition on
tampering with TPMs*: https://goo.gl/forms/h1s1NdjEahY9Ckgm1.


Thanks,

Brandon Butler <https://static.lib.virginia.edu/directory/staff/bcb4y.html>
Director of Information Policy, University of Virginia Libraries

-- 
*Jessica Meyerson*
Research Program Officer
Educopia Institute
http://educopia.org

Working from Austin, TX
jessica at educopia.org <katherine at educopia.org> | 512-864-4575
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kunverj.com/pipermail/rdap/attachments/20170823/4c30e98c/attachment.html>