Digital Commons Network^™

The Prospects For Protecting News Content Under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Priya Barnes

Priya Barnes

The DMCA was enacted to provide adequate legal safeguards against piracy so that content producers, such as music, software, movie and other media producers, would be incentivized to embrace the digital medium. The antitrafficking provision, in particular, imposes civil and criminal sanctions on technology manufacturers who offer the means to circumvent content producers’ digital access controls.

Since its enactment, the DMCA’s antitrafficking provisions have been invoked against hackers of digital music, movies and software. This article weighs the prospects for applying the antitrafficking provisions against news aggregators who access password protected digital news content for redistribution. It concludes that while …