A new bill, to be announced today in Washington DC, would allow US consumers to lawfully copy CDs, DVDs and any other digital works for their personal use. According to the Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who introduced the bill, the “Digital Choice and Freedom Act” is an answer to the power “of copyright holders to control the way consumers use digital content.”

Zoe Lofgren claims that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has altered the “traditional balance” of copyright law against the intent of its creators. The proposed law would give consumers the right to make non-infringing use of digital works, such as making back-up copies of digital works for their personal use, and to use digital works on their “preferred digital media devices.”

The bill goes further, to prohibit non-negotiable clickwrap licences that “limit the rights and expectations” of consumers. Finally, whilst it recognises that copyright owners are free to employ technical measures to protect their work, it requires them to “ensure that those measures allow lawful consumers to make non-infringing uses of the work.”

If a copyright owner fails to make a solution “publicly available”, the bill allows consumers to use circumvention devices without committing an offence.

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