I can't wait to get this news out--Ars Technica is reporting that the US Sixth Circuit Appeals Court has dealt a major blow to the DMCA. You can read the excellent report with lengthy excerpts yourself, but let me sum it up: Lexmark tried to put a special chip on their toner cartridges so they could maintain a monopoly on them--no third-party company could create toner cartridges for use in Lexmark printers unless the company reverse-engineered the chip and put it on their own cartridges. Well, Lexmark promptly sued.

And Lexmark lost.

What's even better is that this decision might pave the way for many other such situations, particulary the ones game console manufacturers use to prevent "unauthorized" software from playing on their systems through similar methods--this could be as significant as the "Sony/Betamax Decision" over the next few years...