Ten Years Ago: Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Ten years ago, Congress reached agreement on a compromise version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The bill was designed to implement World Intellectual Property Organization treaties for protecting music, software and written works on the Internet. But the bill went farther than those 1996 WIPO agreements, making it illegal to circumvent technologies used to protect digital works. "Congress could have, if it really wanted to strike a balance in the most even-handed way, said, 'Okay, we're going to make it illegal for someone to go through these digital wrappers... for the intent of what we would call digital piracy,'" said Adam Eisgrau, legislative counsel for the American Library Association in Washington. "They could have said, 'But you are permitted to go through a digital wrapper if you are doing something other than digital piracy. What we ended up with, is that it is illegal, flat out, to go through a digital wrapper."