TLDR: This changes noth­ing. Today the Librar­ian of Con­gress announced new rules pro­mul­gated pur­suant to the Librarian’s rule­mak­ing author­ity under the Dig­i­tal Mil­len­nium Copy­right Act to exempt cer­tain actions from the pro­hi­bi­tion against cir­cum­ven­tion of copy­right pro­tec­tion sys­tems found in 17 U.S.C. §1201. The “anti-​​​​circumvention pro­vi­sion” states: No per­son shall cir­cum­vent a tech­no­log­i­cal mea­sure that effec­tively con­trols access to a work pro­tected under this title. The Librar­ian is required by §1201 to make a deter­mi­na­tion every three years as to whether any exemp­tions from this pro­hi­bi­tion are nec­es­sary in order to pre­serve access to copy­righted works. In the words of the Librar­ian, his task [ . . . ]

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I have a rose­bush. It is a flori­bunda with deep red–almost maroon–flowers. I’ve been work­ing on it for a few years now, and I prune it when it needs prun­ing, and I water it every other day, and I feed it and rotate it (it is in a large pot) and clip off dead blooms and what­not. I care for it, rather like some peo­ple care for pets. It is a thing that I am proud of. Proud that I have kept it alive (I have a bad track record with plants); proud that I have been able to trans­form it from the scrag­gly lit­tle runt I bought at a Home Depot some­where into a big, [ . . . ]

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Fred Phelps and his West­boro Bap­tist Church have, for some time now, been trav­el­ing the coun­try protest­ing at the funer­als of Amer­i­can sol­diers killed in the line of duty. Back in 2006, they protested out­side the funeral of Marine Lance Cor­po­ral Matthew Sny­der, who was killed in action at the age of 20. See this arti­cle, the orig­i­nal com­plaint, and Monica’s (of Spark a Synapse) post on the same topic for the unpleas­ant details. Eng­lish as a lan­guage lacks invec­tives of suf­fi­cient force and color to con­demn this kind of behav­ior in the terms jus­tice demands. How­ever, has WBC done any­thing prop­erly [ . . . ]

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Some lively back-​​​​and-​​​​forth between Messrs. Inspec­tor and Flib­ber­ti­gib­bet on urban­ism, and Mr. Van Horn’s recent cable com­pany tra­vails got me think­ing on the role of pub­lic roads in government’s abil­ity to exert con­trol over pri­vate prop­erty. This is mildly unfor­tu­nate, how­ever, as I am far too busy at the moment to be think­ing about such things. So I’ve popped it in the oven on a low roast for now, and later tonight I should have a ten­der, juicy morsel for you.