New Federal Law Strengthens Digital Safeguards for Copyrighted Works

In a decision giving copyright holders greater control over the way people use books, movies and music that are distributed in digital form, the United States Copyright Office on Friday endorsed a new federal law making it illegal to break the technological safeguards for such works.. . . In a decision giving copyright holders greater control over the way people use books, movies and music that are distributed in digital form, the United States Copyright Office on Friday endorsed a new federal law making it illegal to break the technological safeguards for such works.

The statute goes into effect immediately.

The ruling was a defeat for several constituencies -- including universities, libraries and computer programmers -- that had argued that the law should preserve traditional rights to archive and lend out copyrighted material or to use so-called reverse-engineering to understand how a piece of technology works.