If you live in the US, you may have heard about the Librarian of Congress’s review of the copyright law. You can rip your DVDs for fair use reasons now, and no one will come after you. Unfortunately, this still doesn’t include a personal archive, but in order to use a small piece for a noncommercial video, you’d have to rip the whole thing anyway.
You can jailbreak and unlock your phone. Do you hear that? You can jailbreak and unlock your phone. Yes, people were doing it anyway, and they’ll likely still have to restore their iPhones to factory settings before taking them to the Genius Bar, but they can do it legally now. Take that, Apple.
Also of interest, you can now legally break DRM on ebooks to have text read aloud, which is also a victory for accessibility.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been fighting for these exemptions for years. No, really, years. Go thank them. Why not donate (it’s tax-deductible)? They’ve been fighting for digital rights since 1990, long before most people knew what the Internet was.
This is one small step toward having a logical copyright system…and toward being able to break DRM on a $.99 song. DRM, you are going down.