The DMCA??™s anti-circumvention provisions make it criminal to willfully, and for
commercial advantage or private financial gain, circumvent technological measures that
control access to protected copyrighted works. In hearings, the crime that the anticircumvention
provision is designed to prevent was described as ???the electronic equivalent
of breaking into a locked room in order to obtain a copy of a book.???
???Circumvention??? is defined as to ???descramble a scrambled work??¦decrypt an encrypted
work, or otherwise??¦avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure,
without the authority of the copyright owner.??? The legislative history provides that ???if unauthorized
access to a copyrighted work is effectively prevented through use of a password, it
would be a violation of this section to defeat or bypass the password.??? A ???technological
measure??? that ???effectively controls access??? to a copyrightedwork includes measures that, ???in
the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or
a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.??? Therefore,
measures that can be deemed to ???effectively control access to a work??? would be those
based on encryption, scrambling, authentication, or some other measure that requires the
use of a key provided by a copyright owner to gain access to a work.
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