I. INTRODUCTION: LEGAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROTECTIONS FOR FAIR USE OF COPYRIGHTED WORKS United States copyright law nominally grants consumers the right to make "fair use" of copyrighted works. (1) When the copyrighted work is distributed in digital form, however, technological impediments may, as a practical matter, prevent some uses of the work that the law would recognize as fair. Distributors of copyrighted digital works may deploy "digital rights management" ("DRM") mechanisms that allow only certain types of access to, or uses of, the underlying copyrighted work and forbid all others. (2) Although technologically sophisticated users may be able to bypass a DRM mechanism and obtain greater access to the work than the DRM mechanism is intended to permit, (3) such circumvention may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 ("DMCA"). (4) DRM technology and the DMCA have been controversial in academic and technological circles: copyright holders may deploy DRM mechanisms that do not allow fair uses of the copyrighted work and the DMCA may protect such mechanisms against circumvention, resulting in a curtailment of consumers' ability to engage in lawful fair uses of digital copyrighted works. (5)
