The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, better known as the DMCA, is a travesty of law. The act was passed in 1998 and since this period of time it has been used in the most egregious ways to shut down Fair Use and competition in the marketplace. From being used to justify illegal subpoenas, to making reverse engineering easily preventable, to shutting down toner cartridge competition, to killing off Fair Use, the law is a major blow to consumer interests. While some uses of the DMCA have met stiff rebuttals from the judiciary (e.g., Lexmark toner ploy was defeated for now), the law remains in need of revocation or serious reworking.

By Ken "Caesar" Fisher at Ars Technica.

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