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 may not undo what Congress so plainly has done by construing the words of the statute to accomplish a result that Congress rejected.”

The persuasive force of Reimerdes is occasionally impaired by the heated—at times, borderline intemperate—rhetoric of the court’s opinion. For example, the court seemed to insinuate that the DeCSS technology was guilty by association with various sordid topics also covered in the defendants’ magazine. The court apparently found it damning that the defendants had previously published “a guide to the federal criminal justice system for readers charged with computer hacking.” Elsewhere, the court likened the defendants to political assassins and the DeCSS code to a virus. It painted the authors of DeCSS, who plausibly claimed to be motivated by the desire to play their lawfully purchased DVD discs on computers running the Linux operating system, essentially as anarchists, describing them as “adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.” The effect is to make it difficult to tell whether, and to what extent, the court’s sweeping reading of the DMCA’s liability provisions, and its denial that copyright’s fair use doctrine was relevant to the reach of the