In 1998, Bill Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that has since changed the way the digital world works.  Anyone who creates content that is either available in digital form or can be transformed into a digital work is affected by the DMCA and is given even more creative control over the content. The DMCA also affects the end users such as you by restricting what you can and cannot do with digital content.

One of the big things that affect students on campus is the ability that the DMCA grants copyright holders to send out what are known as DMCA Takedown Notices. A student will typically get one of these when he or she commits an act of copyright infringement by either hosting a copyrighted file on a website or sharing that file on a peer to peer network such as LimeWire, BitTorrent, or Kazaa. This notice states that the copyright owner believes that you are hosting and allowing redistribution of their content without their expressed permission and is requesting that you take the content down from your website or from being shared. Even after removing the offending content, the recipient has the possibility of receiving a lawsuit much as three years after receiving the notice.

The DMCA does, however, give institutions and businesses such as the university and internet service providers such as Charter, Time Warner, and Comcast, or even content hosting sites such as YouTube “safe harbor”. What this means is as long as they pass the takedown notice to the person, they cannot be sued by the copyright holder.  However if these groups wish to maintain their safe harbor, they have to take down the content or pass along the notice without caring about the content or discriminating.

One large point of controversy about the DMCA is that it limits the fair use rights rights of a user by making the removal Digital Rights Management or DRM from a file illegal. A good example of this is that while it is completely legal to rip the tracks of a CD to your computer so that you can listen to them, under the DMCA it is illegal to rip a DVD to your computer for watching it later or making a backup copy because the DVD is encrypted with DRM. The same is true with any music that you buy from iTunes or audiobooks from Audible, which could be a problem in the future if the format is no longer supported by digital audio players such as Apple’s iPod line or Microsoft’s Zune products.

The DMCA has affected everyone who interacts on the internet whether they realize it or not, From YouTube clips to file sharing, it makes it so that copyright holders can protect their content while not holding the hosting sites liable for what their users do which essentially allows  sites like YouTube to remain on the Internet despite the copyrighted content on there.