According to an article in Wired today, the U.S. Copyright Office approved four new exceptions for legal circumvention in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the most important being one’s ability to “bypass a digital lock to access lists of websites blocked by commercial filtering companies.” Researchers into this area were being extensively hamperred in efforts to analyze the effectiveness of Internet filters in determining what “benign” material was being censored in the process, and what sites were getting unncessarily blacklisted (and thus unaccessible from many public facilities). Unfortunately, the one exemption that I was following closely, allowing a person to “defeat copy-protection technology on CDs that do not play in certain devices, like PCs, in order to make them play,” was denied by the Copyright Office. Although the pros and cons of such an exemption are complicated, all I know is that I have a stack of copy-protected CDs sitting here that arrived for review, of which I can do nothing to since they play correctly in neither my home stereo, my portable music player, or my PC. www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60996,00.html