The following is not meant to be legal advice.
The Librarian of Congress approved under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) a new exemption that addresses the difficulty faced by film studies professors in excerpting films distributed on DVD.
The Librarian of Congress exempted audiovisual works held in a college or university film library when circumvention occurs in order to make compilations of film excerpts for classroom educational use.
Another exemption allows the circumvention of firmware access controls on wireless telephone handsets when circumvention occurs in order to lawfully connect to a wireless communication network.
The Librarian of Congress ruled in favor of an exemption sought to address the "locking" of cellular handsets, the practice of preventing a handset from operating on competing providers' networks.
A third new exemption permits circumvention of technological measures that protect audio CDs if those measures create or exploit security flaws on personal computers. The exemption enables both security researchers and consumers to circumvent such measures in order to test, investigate, or correct security flaws or vulnerabilities, such as the rootkit distributed on Sony BMG CDs in 2005.
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