No doubt at all that there’s plenty to the DMCA other than § 1201, some of which is clearly going to remain highly relevant no matter what becomes of DRM. (Even § 1202 is showing signs of life; the very interesting IQ Group case from a couple of years back rejected an attempt to recast a claim for trademark infringement as a “copyright management information” violation.) The DMCA included lots of things besides the anticircumvention provisions — § 512, to be sure, but also new protections under § 117 for computer maintenance and repair, and the sui generis regime for boat hulls. It was a complicated (probably needlessly overcomplicated) statute. But it was the anticircumvention provisions that have drawn the most commentary — this is the part of the statute that everybody thought was going to kill fair use and lead to a technological lockdown. If changes in the marketplace are making DRM less attractive, they’re making those scenarios less plausible, notwithstanding the ongoing relevance of other portions of the statute.

Luis, I take your point about digital video. (Berkman alum Derek Slater wrote me a terrific e-mail making basically the same point.) That has been a special case since even before the DMCA came along. We’ve never really known a time when commercial digital video content wasn’t at least nominally locked up — from CSS to AACS (both accompanied by region coding) for discs, to HDCP for HDTV. There’s surely no sign of weakening DRM in that context, if only because DRM has always been built into those technologies from the ground up (rather than bolted on as an ill-fitting afterthought in the world of audio CDs, for example).

1. A ton of content has already been shipped and will remain locked in DRM for future generations who will need to break the DMCA to use it (no matter how obscure the law becomes).
2. Section 512 remains as potent as ever.

http://www.copyrightings.com/2008/03/is-dmca-still-relevant.html