Excellent NYT story about the internal contradictions of the DMCA, and the struggle for fair use.
The law also makes it illegal for individuals to use such a program — even to make a back-up copy of a book or movie or song for themselves, the type of copies traditionally allowed under copyright law. That is where the double bind comes in. Actually making such copies for personal use is not illegal. But it is against the law to break through the copy-protection measure to make the legal copies.
…Many libraries and other educational institutions want an exception that would let individuals circumvent a copy- control technology in order to copy portions of a work for use in parody, scholarship or criticism — purposes protected under the "fair use" doctrine of traditional copyright law.
