THE “ANTI-CIRCUMVENTION” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, codified in �1201 of the Copyright Act, were enacted in 1998 and were intended by Congress to prevent copyright “pirates” from defeating anti-piracy safeguards used for copyrighted works and to prohibit distribution of tools and technologies used for circumvention.
Although this goal may seem laudable, in a report published in May, entitled “Unintended Consequences: Three Years Under the DMCA,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) states that “the anti-circumvention provisions [in � 1201] have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than stop copyright privacy.”
