Wired has an article looking back at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was signed into law ten years ago today. In a touch of hyperbole, the headline calls it “the law that saved the web,” which has drawn ire from many of the people leaving comments below it.
The article itself is a fairly well-balanced retrospective on the DMCA’s first ten years of effectiveness, examining both the good and the bad.
The good is the DMCA’s “Safe Harbor” provision, which gives content hosts immunity from prosecution for copyright violation as long as they act to take down the offending material as soon as they receive a complaint. Although this (like any law) is subject to abuse, it has allowed Web 2.0 sites to flourish without fear of litigation as long as they promptly comply with takedown notices.
The bad is, of course, the anti-circumvention provisions that make it illegal to break the Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy-protection on media, even media that you own. This has caused a great deal of trouble to open-source projects and limited what consumers can legally do with DVDs, e-books, and other media.
Wired is not the only one to notice the anniversary; there are a number of other retrospectives and articles about the law appearing. Seth Finkelstein has rounded up some links here.
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