Given the priority currently accorded to security concerns, it is difficult to understand how any government would be willing to undermine security in the name of copyright.  That is precisely what has occurred in the United States, however, where computer security researchers have faced a significant chilling effect on their research due to legal threats from the DMCA.  The U.S. cases are fairly well known: they include Princeton professor Edward Felten facing a potential suit from the RIAA when he planned to disclose his research findings in identifying the weaknesses of an encryption program and Dmitri Sklyarov, a Russian software programmer, spending a summer in jail after presenting a paper at a conference in Las Vegas that described his company's program that defeated the encryption on the Adobe eReader.

Even more compelling are recent comments from Professor Felten at a conference at the University of Michigan.