DMCA 2006 Circumvention Rulemaking - no more censorware exemption

Per AP, the US Copyright Office has now issued the 2006 anticircumvention exemptions for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Sigh ... the attackers won.

http://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/fedreg_notice.pdf

"Although the notice of proposed rulemaking made clear that proponents of renewal of an existing exemption must make their case de novo, proponents in the current rulemaking proceeding made no attempt to make any factual showing whatsoever, choosing instead to rest on the record from three years ago and argue that the existing exemption has done no harm, that nothing has changed to suggest the exemption is no longer needed, and that if anything, the use of filtering software is on the rise. In a rulemaking proceeding that places the burden of coming forward with facts to justify an exemption for the ensuing three-year period on proponents, one cannot assume that the elements of the case that was made three years ago remain true now. Nor is there any evidence in the record that there has been any use of the exemption in the past three years, or that there would be likely to be any use of an exemption during the next three years. While this is not necessarily fatal, nevertheless a record that reveals no use of an existing exemption tends to indicate that the exemption is unnecessary. Together, the absence of any quantification of the current scope of the problem along with the absence of any demonstration that the existing exemption has offered any assistance to noninfringing users leaves a record that provides no basis to justify a recommendation for renewal of the exemption."

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)