New DMCA Exemptions Legalize Phone Jailbreaking & DVD Ripping for Fair Use

If you’re in the United States you might know that there’s this very confusing copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, that (in short) criminalizes certain means of circumventing copyright protection (i.e., digital rights management, or DRM, i.e., that stuff that wouldn’t let you play your MP3s wherever you want). The DMCA […]

Study Unleases Torrent of Criticism

An Australian university has estimated that just 0.3% of files shared through BitTorrent are definitely legal. But torrent advocates have questioned the methodology of the study. The report (PDF), from the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, involved a random selection of 1,000 torrent files. Of those: 890 were confirmed to breach copyright 91 […]