Sixth Circuit Reverses Lexmark
One of the worse bits of law to come out of the Clinton years was the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” (DMCA). The law made it a crime to break any copy protection scheme, even if the data it was protecting was subject to some form of fair use. The law had lots of nasty chilling effects on research, but Lexmark also claimed that it prevented companies from making toner cartridges that would work in their printers.
The won the first round, only to be roundly smacked down in the second. (Three good links at Copyfight.)
As Cory says: Neener, neener, neener. That’s about the right maturity level for responding to Lexmark’s insistence that it could use copyright to control the physical world.