Further Relaxation of Certain Requirements Governing the Export of Encryption Software

On Friday, January 7, 2011, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published amendments to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) that further ease restrictions governing the export of certain encryption software. The rule is effective immediately.

Two Key Changes:

*Loosening of Controls on Mass-Market Software: Publicly available massmarket encryption software with a symmetric key length greater than 64 bits is no longer subject to the EAR once an encryption registration is submitted to the BIS and the product is properly classified.

- Generally, this covers software that is available to any person at no cost and has certain encryption or decryption capabilities.

- If any money is obtained for the software (exceeding the cost of reproduction, if distributed on CDROM) or the software is not freely available for download to any interested end-user, this rule does not apply.

*Loosening of Controls on TSU Software: Publicly available encryption software classified under ECCN 5D002 when the source code is publicly available per license exception TSU (technology and software unrestricted) is no longer subject to the EAR.

Please see full alert below for more information.