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 Copyright Act’s balancing of the interests of content creators on the one hand and consumers and users of copyrighted works on the other. Furthermore, it neatly sidesteps the often-debated question whether the DMCA is inherently inimical to fair use.

The court’s interpretation, however, makes a sufficiently poor fit with the text of the DMCA as enacted to raise challenging questions concerning the decision’s persuasive force in future cases. Nothing in the text of, for example, expressly conditions a defendant’s anti-circumvention or trafficking liability upon a prior showing of copyright infringement. Articulating the contrary view, the Copyright Office has suggested that, while circumvention of a copy control mechanism for a noninfringing purpose would survive scrutiny under the DMCA, circumvention of an access control mechanism for the same purpose would be illegal. The Chamberlain court’s apparent assumption that the defendant must have either infringed, or at least helped contribute to the infringement of, plaintiff’s copyrights also coexists uneasily alongside Congress’s express disavowal in the DMCA of any intention to alter the existing contours of secondary liability for copyright infringement. In short, by purporting to rest its decision upon