Lessons in Copyright Activism: K-12 Education and the DMCA 1201 Exemption Rulemaking Process

摘要

Digital learning is being transformed by changes in copyright law. This article discusses the author's personal journey as a copyright education activist through two rounds of rulemaking proceedings before the Copyright Office concerning the anti-circumvention provisions of one part of the copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is the law that exempts YouTube and other ISPs from liability from copyright claims and criminalizes the circumvention of digital rights management (DRM) software that protects DVDs from being copied. Every three years, petitioners can claim their rights have been compromised by the current law; the Copyright Office pores over the petitions, weighs the pros and cons, and then offers recommendations to the Librarian of Congress, who ultimately grants or denies the exemptions. The author was successful in expanding the rights of K-12 teachers to legally "rip" DVDs by using the Section 1201 rulemaking process, which is one of the only significant ways that educators can expand their rights to use copyrighted material for teaching and learning purposes. By asserting the rights of K-12 educators to circumvent encryption to make fair use of copy-protected DVDs and online digital media for teaching and learning, the law begins to move beyond the needs of large-scale content owners to include the rights of educators and students.