Before we go and enact The Purge IRL, let's step back and think of what actually went wrong. Hollywood wanted a bill that would make it illegal to make certain

Before we go and enact The Purge IRL, let's step back and think of what actually went wrong. Hollywood wanted a bill that would make it illegal to make certain copying tools. This was hot off the heels of the music industry getting a technology mandate for copy protection on digital audio tape (which would eventually be mooted by MP3 players, see RIAA v. Diamond). The problem is, technology mandates are difficult to draft and have significant problems (sometimes it's legal to copy things). So instead of banning copying tools altogether, they made them opt-out. If the copyright holder protects a work from copying, you can't sell the tool that makes it copyable. This created a drafting problem: what constitutes protection? At the time 1201 was drafted the biggest copy protection in force was Macrovision, a system intended to make VCRs copying tapes record an unusable signal. So they just copypasted Macrovision into the DMCA. But there's all sorts of other ways you could copy protect things. Software was the most creative with all sorts of dastardly ways to make nonstandard media, ways to check for that media, ways to check that your checks hadn't been changed, ways to encrypt the binary so you can't disassemble it, ways to check for debuggers so you can't copy the disassembled version of any of the above checks, etc. All of that is way too uncertain to draft into the bill. Congress's answer was to say that anything can by copy protection as long as it keeps you from copying things. This is extremely, offensively overbroad. And it also triggered a slew of new attempts to turn 1201 into a generalized "contempt of business model" tort. We had lawsuits over printer ink and garage door openers, because it's trivial to just smuggle more software into the design of whatever product you want to 'protect.' Thus nobody wants to touch any sort of adversarial compatibility, because that carries insane liability now, and since everything needs software now we've effectively ended capitalism and regressed to feudalism. It is a mistake to think of law as a substitute for morality. Obviously criminal does not equal immoral. However, we can think of laws as a solution to coordinated action problems and economic "game balance". If an entity is too powerful and abusing their power, we can use the law to cut them down to size. When Congress makes mistakes in drafting the law, we create the ability to build illiberal empires. But empires are not creatures of the law. They would still exist without it, making their own laws that would be far worse than the ones Congress gives us. You don't want to know what kind of laws Tim Cook would write if he was freed from having to comply with US law.