Categories
Digital Culture

A loss for digital rights…

In a defeat for Fair Use rights, 321 Studios was issued an injunction from a federal judge instructing them to stop producing or selling their software product DVD X-Copy. The software allows you to backup your DVD’s to recordable DVDs, a right that seems perfectly reasonable (especially given that it IS legal to backup CDs).

Hopefully a higher court will hear this, and come to their senses.

By griffey

Jason Griffey was most recently the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he worked to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise was useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of Library IT and a tenured professor at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently a chapter in Library 2035 - Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries by Rowman & Littlefield. His latest full-length work Standards - Essential Knowledge, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, was published by MIT Press in March 2025.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

One reply on “A loss for digital rights…”

I looked at their software today at Best Buy. Was tempted to pick it up before The Law came a’callin. But it was $70 and I suddenly had a case of the neverminds.

Leave a Reply to travis Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *