Chipping Away at the Idiocy of the DMCA

Huge thanks to the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office for helping out with the train wreck that is the DMCA. This week we get exemptions for to allow us to monitor and analyze our own cars and to play games with dead authentication servers.

From Jalopnik:

Specifically, the Copyright Office said such copies and mods constitutes “noninfringing activity as a matter of fair use and/or under the exception set forth insection 117 of the Copyright Act, which permits the owner of a copy of a computerprogram to make certain copies and adaptations of the program.”

From Gamasutra:

Game developers should pay particular attention to pages 52-56 of the U.S. Copyright Office’s ruling on the petition, as it allows for modification and copying of video games only if they have single-player components which require an online authentication check to play, and those online authentication systems have been formally shut down by a developer/publisher or seemingly abandoned for longer than six months.