Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

This Chapter analyzes the peculiar right to control access to copyrighted works, created by the U.S. Congress in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). It argues that Congress, when it enacted the DMCA, had an overly-simplistic understanding of what it would mean to give copyright owners a right to control access to their copyrighted works. In fact, as the subsequent case law has revealed, the concept of “access” is far more complicated, nuanced, and problematic. Access itself can be taken to mean different things when referring to different types of works (e.g. literary works, movies, software, etc.). Moreover, …