The Digital Millennium Copyright Act .
The Act was enacted in the fall of 1998 to implement the treaties signed in December 1996 at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Geneva conference.
Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software.
Since circumvention is generally required for reverse engineering, this prohibition would prevent reverse engineering from access to a copyrighted work.
DMCA also prohibits the creation or dissemination of tools or information that could be used to break technological safeguards that protect software from being copied.
Many people believe that DMCA is being used against the public to silence researchers, computer scientists and critics.