What is the Copyright Office Rulemaking exemption in the DMCA?
The act of circumvention provision calls for a review of the prohibition on circumventing access controls every three years. [1201(a)(1)(B)] The rulemaking proceedings conducted by the Copyright Office are supposed to document whether noninfringing uses of particular kinds of copyrighted works are hampered by the prohibition. After the Copyright Office makes its recommendations, the Library of Congress can create “classes of works” that users may access through circumvention without obtaining authorization from the copyright owner. [1201(a)(1)(B)] This amendment is intended to transform the prohibition of circumvention into a form of regulation that monitors developments in the marketplace for circumstances in which certain copyrighted materials become less available to the general public. This regulation system may be ineffective if the Copyright Office’s findings also affect the circumvention device ban because of the necessity of using some sort of tool in order to engage in the exe
