"[1] The bill would prevent courts from holding companies financially liable for copyright infringement stemming from the use of their hardware or software, and proposes six permanent circumvention exemptions to the DMCA.

[3] Previously, Boucher co-sponsored the “Benefit Authors without Limiting Advancement or Net Consumer Expectations,” or “BALANCE Act,” which sought to amend the DMCA to account for noninfringing circumvention.

[6] The bill exempted research into “technological measures” from infringement and enabled consumers to circumvent DRM, and qualified that using services for noninfringing uses would not be a violation.

[10] Circumvention for the purposes of avoiding objectionable content became an issue in 2006, when a Denver judge ruled that the edited versions of films sold by companies such as CleanFlicks and CleanFilms were not considered fair use.

In its decision, the court did not address the legality of companies who offered software or hardware that would “read” unaltered media and skip objectionable content.

Section (II) allows the sale of hardware, such as modified DVD players sold by CleanPlay, and software, like downloadable plug-ins, that would skip such content.

[10] Arguably, Section (IV) would expressly allow initiatives such as Google Books, which was originally pioneered in 2004 as a database to increase the availability of, and readers' access to, public domain works.

It allows circumvention that is carried out to gain access to a work of substantial public interest solely for the purposes of "criticism, comment, news reporting, scholarship, or research.

[21] The bill was also criticized for not maintaining the more strongly worded exemptions enumerated in previous incarnations of DMCA reform legislation, in particular, those regarding the makers and distributors of circumvention technology, which meant that “a film studies professor would be permitted to use software such as Handbrake...