One of Lawmeme's editors, Ernest Miller, has submitted comments to the Library of Congress pertaining to the harm that DMCA does to consumers versus the benefits to the media and content industries. The purpose of these comments is to assist in seeking a DMCA excemption for the CSS access control device. If you are not familiar with excemptions under the DMCA, you should read up on Seth Finkelstein's piece, How To Win (DMCA) Exemptions And Influence Policy. If you are not familiar with CSS, then I encourage you to read up at Harvard's OpenLaw: Open DVD site.
Quoting verbatim the conclusion of the submission, "LawMeme therefore submits that in balancing the harms of inhibiting the core First Amendment values of comment and criticism by individuals in lawful possession of DVDs with the nonexistent harms to copyright holder motion picture studios, an exemption is justified in the case of ancillary audiovisual works distributed on Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs) using the Content Scrambling System (CSS) of access control. Alternatively, LawMeme submits that CSS is not an access control device and thus not subject to this rulemaking."
Although the document was primarily written by our Editor-in-Chief, Ernest Miller, thanks go out to those that assisted in creating the document, namely Robert Glushko, James Grimmelmann,
Gwen Hinze, Eric Olsen, Paul Szynol, Fred von Lohmann, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Our submission is available in in PDF format by clicking here [PDF]. WARNING: This document is almost 500k.