VHS Copyright Laws
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1998. One of its provisions forbids the circumvention of technological anti-piracy measures built into commercial software, even if this circumvention is not itself a violation of existing copyright law. This provision makes it illegal in most cases for users to copy VHS movies to DVD, for example, even if the copy was obtained for personal use only.
Other People Are Reading
-
Traditional Copyright Law
-
Traditional copyright law includes a "fair use" doctrine that allowed users of software, videos and digitally recorded music to make backup copies of a copyrighted work and to copy digital works from one format to another for personal use. This doctrine also allows anyone to use a small portion of a copyrighted work for certain purposes (quotation or criticism, for example).
Anti-Piracy Measures
-
In response to rampant pirating, producers of copyrighted digital works developed measures to prevent digital works from being copied. These anti-piracy measures were designed to prevent copyright infringement, but incidentally prevented legitimate copying of digital works as well. In response to these technological anti-piracy measures, circumvention technology was developed, and a technological race began between pirates and copyright holders. The DMCA was passed in part to provide a legal basis for prosecution of developers and users of circumvention technology. The law makes it illegal to "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [copyrighted] work."
-
Legal Exceptions
-
The DMCA provides seven major exceptions to its anti-circumvention provision. Circumvention is permitted for educational purposes, for law enforcement purposes, for the purpose of developing interoperable systems, for encryption research, to protect individual privacy and to protect minors from being exposed to inappropriate material on the Internet.
Freedom of Information Concerns
-
Anti-piracy technology physically prevents users from performing many acts that fall under the "fair use" exception. Because the DMCA prevents circumvention of this technology, many fair uses of copyrighted material are now effectively illegal. This has led to concerns that the free flow of information will be inhibited as more and more information is stored in digital form.
First Amendment Concerns
-
The DMCA has been used by the recording industry and other digital copyright holders to prevent activities that many believe are protected under the First Amendment. Lower courts have ruled that acts such as posting a link to an online circumvention device and discussing the technical aspects of circumvention measures in a research paper violate the DMCA. The Supreme Court has yet to resolve these types of issues.
-
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of Paul
