The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a controversial piece of U.S. legislation passed in 1998. It was intended to update copyright law to accommodate the Internet, and criminalizes any technologies, devices, or services meant to circumvent copyright measures (with the exception of security-related tasks and encryption research).
DCMA Title II, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), specifically defines a safe-harbor for Internet Service Providers (ISPs): as long as ISPs meet several provisions outlined in the DCMA, they will not be accountable for the actions of their clients. In other words, ISPs will not be held responsible if one of their subscribers commits copyright infringement (though that client’s service must be canceled). In exchange, copyright holders have the right to subpoena an ISP for the identification of an alleged copyright infringer.
In the twenty-first century the misuse of copyrighted material is an almost daily occurrence. Take the most common case for example: the illegal downloading of music has proliferated so much that it is a wonder how the record industry even manages to stay afloat (probably through advertisements and live performances). From a physical standpoint, it may not seem like that much of a problem for users to download or share copyrighted material. After all, twenty years ago no one complained if someone lent a friend a DVD for a weekend, right? This twentieth century mindset may be the reasoning as to why many people engage in the explicitly illegal behavior; the consequences of copyright violation are just not apparent from the click of a single mouse button. “I’ve already paid for the product anyway, right?” This line of thinking makes digital copyright laws seem needlessly strict. But is this physical analogy really all that accurate? One important distinction to note is that breaking copyright laws usually means having the copyrighted product permanently. In this sense, it is less like lending a friend a DVD for a weekend and more like burning the DVD and giving it to them to keep!
Things get a little grayer when considering other subtle factors. If a product exists in several different formats, should it be considered several different products? Or should users that have a single version of a product also have the right to access it in various forms? What if users are only “sampling” the material? The answer to these questions don’t make a perfect transition from physical to digital, and it may be dangerous to try and address all of them at once with a blanket law that attempts to cover all possible cases. Ideally, I believe that the law should make clear that digital properties are their own form of media instead of trying to modify the laws for physical copyright. To follow up, they should create an organized system for interpreting each creator’s copyright terms. Of course always considering each case individually would cost a lot of time and resources, so this may not be the most practical approach. General guidelines should govern a majority of the procedure, but I still believe there should be room to interpret a single case free from the guidelines if the need arises.
Even today, new technologies are adding more angles into the piracy problem. Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, which did not exist ten years ago, have addressed some problems with piracy. Cloud computing has given users a sense of digital property and a place of permanence on the Internet, but the problem of getting rid of piracy completely is less of a technology issue than it is a social one.
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