My personal opinion is that this should have been part of DMCA 1201 from the get-go. We already have a Copyright Office triennial rulemaking to decide, without

My personal opinion is that this should have been part of DMCA 1201 from the get-go. We already have a Copyright Office triennial rulemaking to decide, without having to go through a court, if a particular hypothetical instance of breaking DRM is lawful. But it's still illegal to actually provide the tools needed to break that DRM, and as far as I'm aware that doesn't go away even if you only provide tools to people who need them. So everyone's expected to independently research how to break DRM to build one-off hacks for specific systems. This seems like an extremely high burden when the DRM is implicating fair use, which is part of free speech. What we should have done was oblige DRM vendors to provide lawful access to protected media. If they don't comply in some way to facilitate the access that was improperly blocked, then we let the Copyright Office march in and strip that DRM system of its legal protections.