Small victories for fair use

The Librarian of Congress has approved four exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on bypassing digital "locks" on copyright material, Wired News reports:

People may bypass a digital lock to access lists of websites blocked by commercial filtering companies, circumvent obsolete dongles to access computer programs, access computer programs and video games in obsolete formats, and access e-books where the text-to-speech function has been disabled.

(If you prefer your information in a less concise form, here's the original, official announcement.)

Some fair-use advocates hailed the move. Others were disappointed it didn't go further; the Electronic Frontier Foundation had asked for further exemptions, including the right to circumvent DVD region coding and skip through commercials on DVDs.

Admittedly, I'd love to be able to do both those things, but I'm a little fuzzy on how they constitute "fair use" under the Copyright Act.