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 =====a. Chamberlain v. Skylink=====

In Chamberlain v. Skylink, the plaintiff, Chamberlain, manufactured garage door openers that incorporated what the court presumed to be copyrighted computer software code. Chamberlain’s software was designed to recognize a certain set of transmitted numerical codes as valid commands to open the owner’s garage door. Chamberlain included in its software a separate routine that would “reset” the listing of accepted codes, enabling a user to open their garage door even if the first transmitted code was not recognized as valid. Skylink, a competitor, produced and sold a “universal transmitter” that was capable of operating with garage door openers sold by many other companies, including Chamberlain’s. Skylink’s transmitter was designed to transmit a burst of three code sequences in rapid succession that would either be recognized as a correct code, or else trigger the “reset” routine in Chamberlain’s software—resulting, in either case, in the opening of the owner’s garage door.

Chamberlain sued, alleging that the code sequences were technological measures that protected access to the copyrighted software embedded in its garage door openers. The district court granted summary judgment to Skylink on Chamberlain’s DMCA claim, and the court of appeals affirmed.

The court in Chamberlain, like the court in Reimerdes, characterized the dispositive issue as whether the defendant had authority to access plaintiff’s copyrighted work in the manner in which it did. The two courts’ conceptions of what “authorization” entailed, however, could scarcely be more dissimilar. Whereas Reimerdes had looked only at whether the copyright owner had granted express permission for the defendant’s access, the Chamberlain court viewed the lack of Chamberlain’s permission as essentially irrelevant to the