That's all very abstract, but here's what it means: if a manufacturer sticks some #DigitalRightsManagement (#DRM) in its device, then anything you want to do that involves removing that DRM is now illegal - even if the thing itself is perfectly legal.
When Congress passed this stupid law in 1998, it had a very limited blast radius. Computers were still pretty expensive and DRM use was limited to a few narrow categories.
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In 1998, DMCA 1201 was mostly used to prevent you from de-regionalizing your DVD player to watch discs that had been released overseas but not in your own country.
But as we warned back then, computers were only going to get smaller and cheaper, and eventually, it would only cost manufacturers pennies to wrap their products - or even subassemblies in their products - in DRM. Congress was putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, and it was bound to go off in Act III.
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