my DCMA reply posted @ copyright.gov

As part of the Copyright Office's discussion on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US, public comments on the anti-circumvention clause (1201) are allowed, which are then posted on the copyright.gov site. Since I've been researching and working on ideas for software archiving, myself and Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive posted a reply comment (PDF file) dealing with the preservation of obsolete software that has hardware dongles. The full document explains it better than I can in a short amount of space or time, but there's a concern that, over a long period of time, obsolete dongle-based software won't be allowed to be archived properly, so when its copyright does finally lapse, there won't be a working copy left.