The U.S. Copyright Office opened the tenth triennial rulemaking under Section 1201 of the DMCA, which grants temporary exemptions from the ban on circumventing access controls. In a notice published in the Federal Register, the Office said the Register intends to recommend renewal of all but one of the existing exemptions and opened three rounds of comment on newly proposed classes: initial comments are due 7 December 2026, responses 22 February 2027 and replies 22 March 2027, with comments capped at 25 pages per class. Two of the renewed classes cover text and data mining - motion pictures, and electronically distributed literary works - for researchers at nonprofit institutions of higher education, petitioned by Authors Alliance and the Library Copyright Alliance. The Association of American Publishers opposed the literary-works renewal, arguing that licensed mining products have grown and that corpora created under the exemption can be passed to generative AI training. The Office found the licensed offerings cover only part of the works in scope and did not show the record had changed, so it supports renewal.
Our takeThe exemption is bounded by who assembles a corpus and why - nonprofit research and teaching - not by what the corpus trains afterwards. That is the seam: a dataset gathered lawfully for mining can be handed to a model with no technical marker separating the two uses, and the notice records the concern without proposing a control. Narrowing it would require something enforceable at the corpus level, such as provenance or use terms that survive transfer; absent that, the distinction lives only in stated intent.