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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Accord­ing to Reuters, FCC com­mis­sion­ers voted 5–0 today to pro­ceed with craft­ing a “net neu­tral­ity” rule, send­ing the cur­rent lan­guage (which would strip tele­com com­pa­nies of the right to con­trol how they use their own prop­erty) to the print­ing office for pub­lic com­ment. Com­ments will be accepted until Jan­u­ary 14th. The Notice of Pro­posed Rule­mak­ing is avail­able online here [PDF]. You can upload your com­ments using ECFS here, using pro­ceed­ing num­ber 09–191. You can read oth­ers’ com­ments on ECFS here. I’m writ­ing com­ments to sub­mit right now. I’ll post my com­ments here when I fin­ish. I encour­age every­one who loves the Inter­net and [ . . . ]

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