101 Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is an expansion of copyright law in the United States that clarifies rights as they pertain to digital material. The act was enacted by the federal government in 1998 to implement the rules of two International Intellectual Property Organization treaties, but it also includes additional safeguards and liability restrictions not included in those treaties. Despite being in effect for more than a decade, there is still much misconception about what the DMCA does and does not accomplish.

DMCA Requirements

The DMCA is divided into five parts, known as titles, that address a number of concerns, such as the Copyright Office’s duties and copyright protections for some foreign works. The DMCA’s most well-known clauses, however, are those dealing with digital rights management (DRM) and online copyright responsibilities.

Digital Rights Management is the management of digital rights.

DRM is a term that refers to technical measures that restrict access to digital material. It is added to works by content providers to avoid copyright infringement of digital resources.

The DMCA makes it a felony to “break” these protections in order to get illegal access to a work, such as a download you did not purchase. It does not make creating a duplicate of a work you properly possess illegal, even if you have to circumvent DRM to do it. It does, however, make or sell gadgets that allow you to circumvent those measures illegal.

The DMCA also specifies numerous more instances in which DRM may be overridden. Among them are:

Nonprofit libraries and educational groups may overcome access barriers to determine if a work is one to which they want permitted access.
Research and testing- A person in possession of a legal copy may hack into it in order to reverse engineer it and find out how to make it operate with other programs. Controls may also be cracked by researchers in order to evaluate encryption systems and security measures.
Privacy- If the work or its access controls can gather and/or share personally identifiable data about the user, circumvention is permitted.

Copyright management information (CMI) is information connected to a work that identifies it, as well as terms and conditions for its use and other relevant elements. The DMCA renders removing or changing CMI, as well as distributing works with bogus CMI, unlawful.

Responsibility Limitations for Online Copyright Infringement

The DMCA establishes a “safe harbor” for internet service providers whose users infringe on copyright and reduces their liability for making temporary copies of copyrighted material. A service provider is defined broadly under Chapter 5, section 512(k)(1)(B) of U.S. Copyright law as “a supplier of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefor,” while certain liability protections are accessible exclusively to a restricted selection of providers.

Service providers (website hosts, forum operators, etc.) that allow subscribers to publish content online may be immune from liability if they are ignorant of the infringing material and have a policy of canceling accounts of serial infringers. They must also delete or otherwise restrict access to the infringing content as soon as they receive a takedown notification. They will not be held accountable for the infringing content or for removing it as a result of a false or erroneous request.

The DMCA further states that system caching—temporarily storing copies of data to save bandwidth use and waiting time for the same information to be loaded repeatedly—is not a copyright violation. Services that link to illegal content are not liable if they were unaware the material was infringing and react to a takedown notification by deleting the links or limiting access to the material.

The DMCA Takedown Request

If someone is uploading your copyrighted work without your permission, the DMCA allows you to enlist the assistance of service providers to get it deleted.

You may file a DMCA takedown notice to any service provider linked with the infringing material, such as the website host, ad networks such as Google’s AdSense, and search engines that are displaying the content in their search results. Your notification should contain the following information:

Your name and mailing address
The website of the infringement and the specific location (URL) of the infringing material The action you want done, such as banning access to the site or deleting the infringing pages from a search engine’s index
A declaration that you feel the content utilized is not protected by fair usage.
A declaration under penalty of perjury that the notification is correct

To protect its limited responsibility, the service provider must take action against infringing content as soon as possible.

Notifications in response

The DMCA also protects against false or erroneous takedown notices. If your work was taken and you know it was not infringing, you may react with a counter notice that includes the following information:

Your name and mailing address
Description of the deleted material and its original location
A declaration under penalty of perjury that the item was deleted in error

Unless the putative copyright owner files a lawsuit within 10 business days of the first notification, the service provider must restore the content within two weeks of receiving your notice.

Contact an attorney who is familiar with DMCA takedown notices if your work has been unlawfully uploaded online or if you have received an incorrect takedown notice.