Digital Millennium Copyright Act overview and implications

DMCA

Technology has changed the lives of many people in many different ways. As a result of the technological impacts of recent decades, new rules and laws have been created to allow for fair trade and just markets. One of these important laws is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that was signed into law in 1998. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the DMCA and the impacts that this law has had on society. This essay will discuss both supporting and dissenting views of this law and use a real world case example of how the DMCA is enforced and interpreted.

The DMCA has stirred much controversy in its existence. The DMCA looks to manage digital rights of media that became very popular and easy to produce in the late 1990s. The law was enacted October 28, 1998 by then-President Bill Clinton. The purpose of the DMCA was to create an updated version of copyright laws to deal with the special challenges of regulating digital material. The main objective of the DMCA is to protect the rights of both copyright owners and consumers.

The law complies with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, both of which were ratified by over 50 countries around the world in 1996. The law was drafted by people and contibutors from many different areas of society. Publishers, scientists, civil rights groups and others all wanted to have their say in this new law and the DMCA is considered a compromise measure by many of these groups, whose interests frequently conflict.

DMCA attempts to minimzie or eliminate man ethical, and even necessary activities. For example, security-related tasks that involve circumventing security systems, encryption research, or reverse engineering software would be illegal. Prior to the law's passing, 50 of the country's most prominent computer scientists and technology signed a letter to the U.S. congress warning that DMCA, as originally envisioned, would have some very threatening effects on security and information.

Some changes to accomodate this problem were made to the DMCA to allow specified exceptions, such as encryption and security research. Industry, consumer, and civil rights groups continue to appraise the law, and many states are considering their own versions. In April 2003, a group called the Broadband and Internet Security Task Force produced an update to the law, sometimes referred to as "Super DMCA." This later version adds important concepts, such as "the intent to defraud," to the stipulations of the original law.

Felten (2013) has witness the DMCA erode many positive attributes of the internet and some people have suffered. He reported that "What was Congress thinking when it passed this part of the DMCA? The act was meant to update copyright law for the 21st century, to shore up the shaky technologies that tried to stop people from copying music and movies. But the resulting law was too broad, ensnaring legitimate research activities. It showed that the DMCA had become a go-to strategy for companies facing embarrassing revelations about their products." This critique centers around the idea that research into any one topic is disallowed due to the extreme copyright laws that the DMCA supports.

Support for the DMCA stems from the fact that Internet Providers and host companies are immune from DMCA punishment. This is good according to Kravets (2008). He argued that "the DMCA's separate notice-and-takedown provision has proven even more crucial to the growth of the internet. The provision grants immunity to so-called "intermediaries" -- ISPs, for example -- for any copyright infringement by their users. To earn that so-called "safe harbor," the intermediary such as video-sharing site YouTube must promptly remove material if the copyright holder sends a takedown notice. But the company can restore the content if the user certifies that it's non-infringing, and the copyright claimant fails to sue. These two protections for intermediaries have been absolutely crucial for giving us the internet today," says Fred von Lohmann, an internet attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which just released its report on the DMCA. "You could not run a blog without these. You couldn't run MySpace, AOL without these two things."