Legislation

The US Copyright Office issued new rules today that will give consumers more freedom to crack DRM-enabled digital content in order to consume the works in noninfringing ways. In other words, it is now legal to jailbreak content, so long as the consumer is not infringing on the copyright of the material, and they are following the new rules.

The Copyright Office selected six different categories of content and spelled out appropriate digital cracking. For eBooks, DRM can only be cracked when the audio tracks have been disabled.

From the Copyright Office’s statement: “Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.”

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The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education are taking on eReaders in universities, claiming that the Kindle DX may violate the “Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990″ and Section 504 of the “Rehabilitation Act of 1973″ in the classroom, because the eReaders are not designed for students that are blind or have low vision abilities.

According to the Act, if universities have technology in classrooms, then they must be accessible to individuals with disabilities. Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice and Russlynn Ali, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education authored an open letter to university presidents across the country raising concerns that the Kindle DX is not fully accessible to students with disabilities and therefore universities should not endorse the readers.

From the letter, “The Department of Justice recently entered into settlement agreements with colleges and universities that used the Kindle DX, an inaccessible, electronic book reader, in the classroom as part of a pilot study with Amazon.com, Inc. In summary, the universities agreed not to purchase, require, or recommend use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless or until the device is fully accessible to individuals who are blind or have low vision, or the universities provide reasonable accommodation or modification so that a student can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use.”

Perhaps Ray Kurzweil’s text-to-speech Blio software will help address these challenges.

The Texas attorney general Greg Abbott and the FTC are both investigating eBook pricing and eyeing Apple for the way that eBooks are sold on the iPad. Hachette Book Group and News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers have both reportedly been contacted by the Texas official.

From Publisher’s Weekly, “According to those with knowledge of the department’s civil investigative demands (or CID, their request for documents and other information), the queries began in early to mid-April within days of the launch of Apple’s iPad and iBookstore, and the transition by five book publishers to an agency model for selling ebooks to their accounts.”

From the Wall Street Journal, “It isn’t yet clear what areas of inquiry Texas is pursuing. One possible focus is Apple’s e-book pricing and its impact on consumers. Apple, in seeking to attract content for the iPad, opted for an agency pricing model in which publishers set their own retail prices and receive 70% of the price while sellers receive the remaining 30%.”