NEWS: DMCA Abandons Abandonware, Cellphone Firmware, Dongles

GEEK: DMCA Abandons Abandonware, Cellphone Firmware, Dongles

In a move labeled by outgoing Republican lawmakers as a brazen attempt to give me an excuse to blush and timidly wave at SG's Geek Editor, The US Copyright Office has approved a half dozen geek-friendly exemptions to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The three-year exemptions are the result of the third in a series of proceedings mandated by the DMCA, which was passed into law despite containing language which inexplicably allows the Copyright Office to "determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention of access controls."



For details on what formats are now exempted, we're joined live on the scene by ace reporter Giant Block Quote:

Abandonware, cell phones, CDs, ebooks...even dongles. Dongles, America. DONGLES. Entire AV departments won't be safe from the rampaging hordes of piracy-maddened citizens, as long as those citizens are educators whose sole purpose in their rampages is to make a mashup video of Gregory Peck's most memorable scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird and random excerpts from the Battletoads Game Gear port.



Truly, dark times are in store for America.

Small but needed changes. Never thought I'd see some of these come to pass. It's a shame they're only in effect for the next three years; are they just testing the waters to make sure they don't piss off corporations before making these permanent?

The wording of #2 is especially interesting-- by focusing on format, it legitimizes, say, "preserving" the contents of an NES cartridge even if the same program is available in another, current format, such as for download to the Wii. I have to wonder what comprises an "archive." Could a publicly-accessible archive of all NES ROMs be legal?

So does that mean Dreamcast games are OK to pirate since they don't make the system anymore?

I'm no lawyer, but by the wording it seems to be perfectly legal.

I bet the abandonware clause was put into effect because of compilation discs, nintendo's virtual console, and gametap. It's a great clause because the true abandonware can be saved shared and enjoyed, while the companies can go attempt to make money off the games that are still viable.

No. It means that it's OK to circumvent any copy-protection on a Dreamcast game that you own for the purpose of, say, using it with a Dreamcast emulator or writing a game engine that uses the game's original data files (think SCUMMVM). Since the console is "obsolete", you now are ok to do these things so as to access the copyrighted works that you paid for. You're still not allowed to pirate the games because that's copyright infringement.

Not that anyone really cares how many downloaded DC games you have, but it's still technically illegal. Of course, I am not a lawyer, but that's how I'm reading this. It seems to be in pretty plain English.

I just like saying "Dongle".

What's a Dongle? I'd look it up, but I'm afraid to google it.

It is a piece of hardware you connect to a computer to authorize some software you are running on it. The most common one, I think, would be a usb memory stick with some sort of encryption key on it.

And if anyone in the United States is interested in getting more exemptions or doing away with the DMCA all together you should check out IPAC which is a Political Action Committee that promotes "preserving individual freedom through balanced information policy". They were started by some guys at the EFF since the EFF was unable to give money or support specific candidates with out loosing their nonprofit status.

I've always understood abandonware to mean no-longer-available DOS/Windows games, and this really doesn't seem to affect that all that much. I mean, okay, so it would probably be legal to crack programs that require the original 5.25" floppy, if there are any such, but.. other than that, the machine and the media necessary are both perfectly available.

I didn't realize they were still being used by the time USB was invented. They used to be little things that looked like parallel port plugs without cables. And yeah, dongle is way fun to say.

Dongle is just an ambiguous term for hardware that authorizes software. Nowadays there aren't many programs that require this although I am sure there are some really expensive proprietary ones still out there. However what is more common is using using a usb stick to authorize a computer to boot up, login (so the software in that case OS), or store encryption keys used by various programs running on your OS. I personal have a laptop that requires either a usb dongle (which contains my encryption key) or a pass phrase otherwise you can't decrypt my hard drive.