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 in Title 17 would appear to indicate that Congress recognized their connection with copyright.

More persuasive, therefore, are those courts that have attempted to harmonize the DMCA with other provisions of copyright law, applying the settled principle that statutes in pari materia should be construed together. Construing the DMCA alongside the rest of copyright law makes available powerful analytical tools of proven usefulness. Consider, for example, the functionality principle, which rests upon the dichotomy long recognized in copyright law between idea and expression. The familiar general rule is that, even where copyright protects a work, copyright protection does not extend to aspects of the work that are predominantly functional rather than expressive. Courts applying this principle have declined to extend copyright protection to portions of computer software or other articles that reflect predominantly functional, rather than expressive or creative, concerns. The functionality doctrine serves a valuable purpose in ensuring that copyright protection does not restrict that which should remain “open and free to the use of the public.”

Interpreting the DMCA as a copyright statute brings copyright’s functionality doctrine into play. The functionality principle, in turn, does much to justify decisions like Lexmark and Chamberlain. Because the works the plaintiffs in both those cases sought to protect were closely