The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

This is a book about the DMCA - Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It explains a little of what the DMCA is, gives copyright history and provides links to more information. The DMCA affects all who use computers and is worth investigation.

Full text of Digital Copyright Act with legislative history, associated case law and other materials relevant to the subject.

In today's globalized and digital era, infringement of copyright is an important issue. The big question is how far copyright is transferable and to what extent can copyright be used for advancement and development of knowledge society, particularly with regards to library and information science. This book examines the issue of copyright infringement within India, as well as with international legal regimes, and includes the following coverage: Copyright: History and Development * Copyright Act 1957 * Duration and Infringement * Copyright Office and Copyright Board * Universal Copyright Act * Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) * International Copyright Act and Intellectual Property Right * World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO Treaty) * Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) * Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH) * recent developments on part of India's government/society in this respect. The book will be useful to librarians, information scientists, academics, legal practitioners, business executives, and others. [Subject: Library and Information Science, Copyright Law]

I completed the original manuscript of Digital Copyright in 2000, two years after Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The 1976 Copyright Act was itself 24 years old, and beginning to show its age. The Internet, in contrast, was still new and shiny and scary, especially for legacy entertainment and information businesses and the copyright lawyers who represented them.Seventeen years later, the Internet has become an essential feature of all of our lives and the copyright laws designed to tame it seem elderly and barnacle-encrusted. Remarkably, the legislative process that has made sensible copyright law reform all but impossible has stayed largely unchanged. Congress and the Copyright Office have recently launched what is billed as a comprehensive reexamination of copyright law with the goal of overhauling the law for the 21st century. It seems likely that these efforts will hew to the patterns of earlier copyright revision. Perhaps we stick with the tried and true approach to making copyright laws, even though it results in bad laws, because the process works so well for so many of the participants. Members of Congress can rely on affected industries to come up with broadly acceptable compromises, and to take on much of the burden of pressuring other interested groups to swallow them. Meanwhile, Senators and Representatives can continue to collect generous campaign contributions. The Copyright Office can be the center of attention as it plays a crucial role in managing the multilateral negotiations and interpreting their results to Congress. Copyright lobbyists and trade organizations can collect hefty fees from their members, in return for supplying them with laws that will give them competitive advantages against the next new thing, whatever it is. Because the laws that emerge from this process don't work very well, meanwhile, everyone can look forward to another round.Although the book is ancient in Internet time, people seem to have continued to read it. Now that it has finally gone out of print, I'm delighted to be able to make it more freely available under a Creative Commons license. In addition to the Afterword that I wrote for the 2006 paperback edition, I have included a postscript looking back briefly on what, if anything, we might have learned from the aftermath of the stories told in this book.Postscript is available at: 'https://ssrn.com/abstract=2968546' https://ssrn.com/abstract=2968546.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act was enacted in 1998 and is currently being used to restrict hyperlinking.

The evolution of activism against the expansion of copyright in the digital domain, with case studies of resistance including eBook and iTunes hacks. The movement against restrictive digital copyright protection arose largely in response to the excesses of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. In The Digital Rights Movement, Hector Postigo shows that what began as an assertion of consumer rights to digital content has become something broader: a movement concerned not just with consumers and gadgets but with cultural ownership. Increasingly stringent laws and technological measures are more than incoveniences; they lock up access to our “cultural commons.” Postigo describes the legislative history of the DMCA and how policy “blind spots” produced a law at odds with existing and emerging consumer practices. Yet the DMCA established a political and legal rationale brought to bear on digital media, the Internet, and other new technologies. Drawing on social movement theory and science and technology studies, Postigo presents case studies of resistance to increased control over digital media, describing a host of tactics that range from hacking to lobbying. Postigo discusses the movement's new, user-centered conception of “fair use” that seeks to legitimize noncommercial personal and creative uses such as copying legitimately purchased content and remixing music and video tracks. He introduces the concept of technological resistance—when hackers and users design and deploy technologies that allows access to digital content despite technological protection mechanisms—as the flip side to the technological enforcement represented by digital copy protection and a crucial tactic for the movement.