Copyright in the Digital Millenium

Introduction

Nearly everyone who has uploaded videos to YouTube has had one taken down for copyright infringement. But not as many people know that without that, YouTube could be shut down. Since the printing press was invented, copyright has existed to secure the livelihood of content creators. The idea of copyright is that an author can continue to sell their work without fear of mass reproduction without compensation. This way, content owners are able to pay for housing, materials, food, and other necessities to support them and their families. Without copyright, anyone who had the means could mass-produce a book without paying the original author and sell copies themselves, stealing the profits. The concept of copyright, intended to protect the livelihood of content creators, can be applied for good or bad, and the rise of technology has created a slew of new ways to use and abuse it.

History

The concept of copyright has existed for thousands of years. Although the specifics have changed, the purpose of copyright has remained the same: to protect the original author of a work. One of the first instances of something similar to copyright happened in 560 AD in Ireland: a monk copied another monk’s manuscript, and a particularly valuable one at that, and the original author demanded the copy back. It was petitioned to the king, who ruled that the copy belonged to the original author. In 1710, one of the first actual copyright laws was created. England’s Statute of Anne was created in a time when printing presses were just coming into use. Before these, copying a book involved a lot of manual work. With a printing press, mass production was made much easier and it was now viable to make many copies of someone else’s work without n...

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...our car, it's illegal to go to another shop.”

On the other side, you have the content authors who need Copyright protections and the DMCA in order to prevent piracy and loss of revenues. Without parts of the DMCA, copyright owners would have a much more difficult time removing their intellectual property from sites like YouTube, because they would need to go to court over it. With the DMCA, the burden of proof is on the alleged infringer to show that pirated content is being used fairly.

There are also organizations, such as the Recording Industry Association of America, which represent content authors collectively in court and could potentially make additional profits from copyright infringement lawsuits in addition to royalties. There are DRM software manufacturers, which can only gain from its necessity (except in cases such as Sony-BMG where they went too far).