The US Copyright Office has opened ten proposed exemption classes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for public comment, two of which deal with works whose promised digital copies no longer work.
The Office reviews these exemptions every three years. TorrentFreak reports that one of the two petitions specifically cites the closure of the anime streaming service Funimation, which shut down its app and website in April 2024 as it became part of Crunchyroll.
The closure also cut off access to the Funimation digital copies that had come bundled with DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Crunchyroll's help page still states that it does not currently support those copies, and encourages affected users to explore the library Crunchyroll does offer.
The films and programmes remain on the discs, and in theory American buyers could make their own digital replacements from them. Doing so would break the law, because the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision prohibits bypassing the encryption on DVDs and Blu-rays unless an exemption applies.
The first petition, from Jayden Milne, asks the Office to let owners of DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray discs make a single secured local copy for personal use where the digital copy promised on the packaging is no longer available. It covers people who redeemed a digital copy before the service behind it closed, and buyers of new discs whose code had already expired: according to the petition, Warner Bros. states that its digital codes expire according to a title's release date rather than the date of purchase, and that expired codes are not replaced.
The conditions are strict. The replacement may not be better than what was promised, so a box that offered an HD digital copy does not entitle its owner to rip the 4K version. The copy is for personal use only. And it must be destroyed if the disc is sold, given away or lost.
A second, related petition, from Zakaria Zerhouane, covers anime more broadly: series and films removed from authorised US streaming platforms when their licences expired, and anime released on disc by US distributors that no longer exist, among them ADV Films, Bandai Entertainment, Central Park Media and Geneon. It also asks for permission to circumvent the DRM, geo-locking and session-based access controls used by streaming platforms.
"Streaming platforms provide no advance removal notice, preventing users from finishing or preserving works before they disappear," Zerhouane writes, adding that consolidation of the US anime market under "a single dominant entity" has made catalogues more volatile. Neither petition covers all video content, and both are limited to personal, non-commercial use. The Office has grouped the requests with four other replacement petitions, which cover personal backups of discs, including before they deteriorate, and format-shifting as playback hardware disappears. Opponents have until February to file objections.
The condition attached to Milne's petition deserves to be read twice. A copy made under the exemption would be lawful while its owner still had the disc, and would have to be destroyed if the disc were lost.
This newspaper supports the proposal and notes what it would establish. The legality of a file on a hard drive would depend on the continued physical existence of a plastic disc that its owner has, by definition, stopped playing.
The disc therefore stops being the recording and becomes the licence. It is the only component in the arrangement that cannot itself be backed up, and the one whose loss cancels everything downstream of it, which is precisely the failure the petition was drafted to address.
The ceiling on quality follows the same logic. An owner holding a 4K disc and the promise of an HD copy may rip only the HD version, which means the exemption protects neither the work nor the disc but the resolution of an undertaking printed on a box by a company that may since have ceased to exist.
The Department of Unnecessary Research regards the scheme as sound and has one request for clarification before February. A copy that must be destroyed when the disc is lost is of use only to a person who has not lost the disc, and that person already has the film.