Congress is set to take some of the fire out of the dreaded DMCA.

Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., author of the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, says consumers should not always have to worry about being slapped with a lawsuit every time they make a copy of their favorite videos.

Boucher's sentaments ring very true considering the shelf life of DVDs and CDs is turning out to be not what was previously promised. What is most promising is the restoration of "fair use".

The new bill amends the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which allowed copyright holders to put digital locks on their work and makes it illegal to break those locks. The bill allows owners of DVDs and other works that have a digital lock to bypass the security and copy the work so long as the user is engaging in "fair use" of the product and not infringing upon its copyright.

Of course Hollywood is going to fight to make sure the bill never becomes law.

"Anything that allows you to decrypt the DVD would not be a legal product," said MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor.

Would that include, oh I don't know, say a DVD player, which decrypts the information encoded on the DVD so that it can be displayed on a television set. Talk about playing on people's technical ignorance.