In 1998, the U.S. Congress passed -- and President Clinton signed -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, one of the most horrific pieces of legislation to come out of the swamp along the Potomac.

The DMCA set up a bunch of ridiculous copyright restrictions, not the worst of which was making it a crime to break any copy-protection for any reason at all. This means that, if a content provider has disabled access to content above and beyond the restrictions of the law, you have to break the law -- that is, the DMCA -- in order to exercise your rights under the law. Federal judges have found the DMCA to be anticompetitive (in that it allows companies to lock down content and make themselves the sole vendor of services for a particular product, which is antitrust) and contrary to the public good (the DMCA errs on the side of protecting intellectual property over benefiting the public; in StorageTek v. CHE, a federal circuit court of appeals wrote, "[T]he DMCA must be read in the context of the Copyright Act, which balances the rights of the copyright owner against the public’s interest in having appropriate access to the work").

Ten years later, Congress -- which gets more money than you might think from content providers like The Walt Disney Co. -- decided to clean up the DMCA. In steps H.R. 1201, the FAIR USE Act, which simulatenously tries to fix the DMCA and continues the annoying trend of using cutesy acronyms as titles of bills.

Things it does:

• Puts into cold, hard legislation the language of 1984's Sony v. Universal, which held that any device that was capable of "substantial non-infringing uses," even if it could be used to also infringe upon copyright, was not an illegal device on its face.
• Makes it not a crime to break copy-protection in instances in which breaking the copy-protection is required to exercise the rights you had anyway, but lost because a private content-provider decided it didn't want you to have them, including breaking copy-protection on works that are in the public domain (and are thus not subject to copyright law).
• Places limits on statutory damages from infringement, so that groups like the RIAA can't demand outrages sums of money for copyright infringement.

Great! But as Ars Technica pointed out when the bill was released on Feb. 27, there's more work to be done. While I disagree with their statement that the FAIR USE Act does not make "any 'fair use' of digital goods legal, regardless of anti-circumvention laws" (which, clearly, it does; cf. §3(b), in which exemptions are made for fair use and archival purposes), I do agree that the bill doesn't go far enough in that it does not allow for "making personal use copies of encrypted materials."

Nevertheless, it's a step in the right direction.