Sherwin Siy to Testify Before Copyright Office on Bypassing Digital Locks for Fair Use
Sherwin Siy to Testify Before Copyright Office on Bypassing Digital Locks for Fair Use
Sherwin Siy to Testify Before Copyright Office on Bypassing Digital Locks for Fair Use

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    Today, Sherwin Siy, Vice President for Legal Affairs at Public Knowledge, will testify before the Copyright Office in Los Angeles to request that the Library of Congress allow consumers to bypass digital locks on their DVDs for the purpose of shifting their movies from discs to their other devices.

    The following may be attributed to Sherwin Siy, VP of Legal Affairs at Public Knowledge:

    “Consumers should have the same rights to the media they've purchased, whether that media is in the form of music CDs or DVDs of movies. It's been abundantly clear that the ability to space-shift media is a fair use — it's been going on for years, even before the introduction of the iPod, with no precedent indicating that it's anything other than a fair use.

    “Right now, the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA make it illegal for people to do with their DVDs what they can with their CDs. Consumers' movie collections are languishing on optical media that's becoming increasingly obsolete in a world of tablet computing and wireless data transfer. In this way, the DMCA is costing consumers money and value today — either locking up, or forcing repurchase of, movies and TV shows they already own. Even worse, the untold number of films and videos unavailable in online formats are completely unavailable to a wide range of devices.

    “Nor will granting the exemption increase infringement. Right now, infringers are already stripping protections from movies and uploading them to the Internet, where the unlocked versions are shared. The current laws do nothing but prevent law-abiding customers from making legal uses of their own digital copies.”

    You can view our initial comments on this issue submitted to the Copyright Office here as well as our recent reply comments.

    Members of the media may contact Communications Director Shiva Stella with inquiries, interview requests, or to join the Public Knowledge press list at shiva@publicknowledge.org or 405-249-9435.