"nally, the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress have spoken (not quite with one voice, of which to come), in the fourth approximately triennial rule-making under Sec. 1201(a)(1) of Title 17, which we were given as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. For those (perhaps wisely) haven't been paying close attention, let me review the bidding. One of the dubious accomplishments of the DMCA - achieved despite the best efforts of various "public interest" copyright campaigners, myself included - was a the introduction of a general prohibition (with new penalties to match) on the unauthorized "circumvention" of so-called "technological protection measures" used to secure copyright works especially in the digital environment - the hacking of encryption being the most obvious example. This "paracopyright" provision (that is, a law that's not copyright strictly speaking, but is related to and reinforcing of it) has various striking features. Perhaps the most striking is that it includes no general "fair use" exception for socially desirable "