Feel Different? The United States Copyright Office Issues Some New Rights.

Quite an interesting and novel development - the U.S. Copyright Office issued new rights:

NEW YORK - Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday.

Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books.

All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. Previously, Billington took an all-or-nothing approach, making exemptions difficult to justify.

"I am very encouraged by the fact that the Copyright Office is willing to recognize exemptions for archivists, cell phone recyclers and computer security experts," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Frankly I'm surprised and pleased they were granted."

But von Lohmann said he was disappointed the Copyright Office rejected a number of exemptions that could have benefited consumers, including one that would have let owners of DVDs legally copy movies for use on Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and other portable players.

The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years.

Score one for the the memory of the Carterphone and Thomas Carter as it relates now to mobile phones - this is definitely something for MobileActive to pick up on, though things seem to have slowed down over there.

It's about time consumers got some more rights acknowledged. When do we get to chat about the public domain? And oh - do these rights extend with TRIPs and GATT? You know, globalization, global economy, WTO, all that stuff? I hope so.