"A question, of course, is how anyone would ever be
able to obtain and use the tools that would legally allow them to
circumvent copy-protection technology if the people that make and
distribute them are thrown in jail or prosecuted in civil trials.
"If you can't go out and buy a device like this, it makes the
ability to exercise your rights under the exception very, very
difficult," said Laura Gasaway, director of the Law Library at the
University of North Carolina. Ms. Gasaway's experience with a
faulty access-control measure on a CD-ROM database helped persuade
the Library of Congress to recommend the exception for
malfunctioning technology.
While some users of digital media have wrestled with the 1998
copyright law's seeming contradictions, it is the Sklyarov case -
the first criminal prosecution under the law - that is exposing the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act to greater public scrutiny."
