Since most readers of this blog are not fans of the DMCA, I thought you all might appreciate this terse and elegant insight about why the DMCA is such a failed law.
“The existence of the DMCA is an open admission that software has failure modes sufficiently severe that regulation by software alone cannot be trusted. The effectiveness of DRM software as a regulator is therefore dependent on the legal effectiveness of the DMCA … The DMCA creates a category of per se illegal software by outlawing programs that do certain things. But in so doing the DMCA aligns itself squarely against software’s plasticity. In making it illegal to create certain kinds of software, it tries to prevent people from taking full advantage of one of software’s greatest virtues: that software can do almost anything one can imagine.” James Grimmelmann in Regulation by Software, p. 1756