Defenseless in the Zombie Infested Internet: Why Audio-Visual Works Demand Exemption Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Eric Maher In the aftermath of Napster and Pirate Bay’s shameless disregard for copyrights, DRM strategies are necessary to protect the incentives that encourage artists and programmers to create and publicly display their works. Yet the security risks associated with DRM levy a high cost on the public, on whose patronage the content creators depend. By restricting research and investigation into security risks in popular public technologies, U.S. copyright law, particularly under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), removed necessary safeguards for the public. The large influx of new consumer electronics demands exemption from the anti-circumvention...
Digital Copyright, “Fair Access” and the Problem of DRM Misuse
Nicolo Zingales The advent of the digital age and the wide diffusion of copyrighted works over the Internet have brought about a drastic challenge to the pre-existing rules and legal standards governing the exchange of information. This article points out one of the ways the development of these new technologies has altered the boundaries of copyright, specifically by enabling copyright holders to strategically expand the scope of protection through the strategic use of Digital Rights Management (hereinafter, DRM). After a brief overview of these technologies and their contribution to the development of online markets for copyrighted works, the article discusses...
File Sharing: A Tool for Innovation, or a Criminal Instrument?
Andrew Eichner The dawn of peer-to-peer networks and the subsequent rise of file sharing over the Internet have proved to be a considerable threat to the revenues of the Recording Industry Association of America (“RIAA”) and the international music community. While early music downloading across peer-to-peer networks on the Internet was largely limited “to college students with access to fast pipes and techno geeks sufficiently driven to search the Net for the latest Phish bootlegs,” the market for illegally downloaded music taken from file sharing websites has expanded to astronomic proportions and continues to do so even at present. The...