copyright office DMCA goodness.

Finally made it back from LA, more on that soon, but while I was there, Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive made his presentation to the Copyright Office's anticircumvention rulemaking hearings regarding the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to the hearing itself, but I'm particularly passionate about saving archaic consumer software from the '70s and '80s before the floppies become unreadable, and helped with the presentation, so was delighted to hear it went well.

Archiving means being able to have a large physical collection of old software, plus actual backed-up data, with all the technology needed to transfer those old formats correctly to modern media (I know we have warez-ed ROMs of a bunch of the material floating around, but it's neither legal nor historically complete!) So I've become the de facto 'point man' for software archiving at the Internet Archive. I helped with some of the technical details and software props for this, experimenting with the Catweasel MK3 for archival tests, sourcing old software for the Archive's collection, and even borrowing some amazing software materials from the wonderful Special Collections at Stanford University (thanks, Henry Lowood!)

We want to make sure we're allowed under law to do this archiving correctly, so thanks again to Brewster, Marian and Alex (the latter two being very tame, lovely, and helpful lawyers!) for crunching to present a great presentation on behalf of the Archive and all of us. Here's an outline of the presentation and a Powerpoint document hosted at the Archive, and here's a third-party account of the hearings, which seemed to go as well as can be expected. Yay - fingers crossed.