Stacy Cowley of IDG News, today at ITworld.com:

Without taking a position on whether SCC's chips illegally incorporate Lexmark code, the Copyright Office ruled that the DMCA does not block software developers from using reverse engineering to circumvent digital protection of copyright material if they do so to achieve interoperability with an independently created computer program.

[ ] SCC had asked the Copyright Office to recommend several DMCA exemptions that would protect its efforts to defeat Lexmark's protection technology. Those requested exemptions are unnecessary because existing DMCA statutes already allow the kind of reverse engineering that SCC could have used to thwart Lexmark's protections, the agency said in a lengthy memo of recommendations about exemptions to the DMCA.

(Emphasis added, and indicates that unlike many of her colleagues Ms. Cowley probably did read the Rulemaking and Register's Recommendation.) I have been surprised and disappointed by the sheer volume of bad reporting on that portion of the Rulemaking that touched on Static Control's rejected exemption request and the Lexmark v. Static Control dispute. Even my favorite television program got taken in, and simply parroted (and drew unsupportable conclusions from) one of the worst early stories that appeared.