Digital Millenium Copyright Act Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Digital Millenium Copyright Act - Research Paper ExampleAdditionally, DMCA created fines for people violating the Act that acknowledge up to $25,000 per download in civil court and up to $500,000 or up to five geezerhood in jail in criminal court (Public). Two of the biggest supporters of the DMCA were the Motion Picture friendship of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) both groups that represent in the MPAAs sideslip film production companies and in the case of the RIAA, record companies. Both see illegal downloading, which is also called piracy, as a huge threat to their industries. The RIAA claims that in in 2009, 63 percent of all euphony possess by Americans was illegally downloaded or otherwise share at a profit loss to the music industry of up to $20 billion a year. (Scope) The MPAA says their levels of piracy are not notwithstanding that enormous, but in 2010 gave the example of the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which th ey claim was legally downloaded 50,000 versus 1.1 million illegal downloads. (Zima 1) Its important to note that the DMCA went into effect in 1998 to stop illegal downloading and yet, according to the RIAA and the MPAA, the daub is only getting worse. Napster, a peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading site that a RIAA member once called the single most deadly website Ive ever seen, (Recording) didnt start operations until several months after the DMCA was signed into law. So does the DMCA have any effect on piracy? Is this now nearly 13 year-old law unperturbed relevant to new technology? First, understand that the DMCA didnt outright ban all downloading of secure temporal off the Internet. What it did was outlaw the spend of technology to get around the anti-piracy technology that copyright holders added to digital technology. For example, the DMCA make illegal the creation and dissemination of software designed to override the anti-copy protection on a impertinently purchased CD, a llowing that CD to be converted into MP3 or MP4 format which then can be easily shared on-line or burned onto a blank CD. It did not specifically make it illegal to engross a P2P downloading service to download pirated music or movies, but it did make it illegal to create and troops a P2P downloading service where copyright protected digital material was knowingly made available by users, which was in a nutshell what caused Napsters demise. (Skolnik 1) Heres what the DMCA did do it placed more restrictions on clear use of a copyrighted product. Fair use is the principle that the public is entitled, without having to ask permission, to use copyrighted works in ways that do not unduly interfere with the copyright owners market for a work (Von Lohmann). For example, it is presently within a persons fair use rights to trade in or sell that DVD to a store for resale. But according to flow rate interpretations of DMCA, it is not within fair use for the person to use software to ext ract the electronic teaching from that DVD and convert the files so the movie can be played on an iPod even if the person it only doing this for personal use and not with any intention of sharing the file. (Von Lohmann) As one dilettante of the DMCA puts it, Photocopiers, VCRs, and CD-R burners can also be misused, but no one would suggest that the public debate them up simply because they might be used by others to break the law