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How Corporations Tried—And Failed—To Control the Spread of Content Online | LitHub

The D.M.C.A. also introduced an unprecedented provision to criminalize a different threat to the entertainment industry’s control of compact discs, which can carry music as well as movies on discs even cheaper to produce and easier to carry than cassettes or tape. Manufacturers had already inserted special control codes to disable attempts to duplicate the disks, and also restricted the regions of the world in which they could be played.

An ingenious teenager worked out how to disable the disabling device so he could play foreign movies on his T.V. set, and so the D.M.C.A. stamped on such clever evasions. Jon Lech Johansen, the part-inventor of the by-pass program known as DeCSS, was acquitted after several trials in Norway, but in the U.S. injunctions against his device were obtained. This was the first time that copyright law was successfully amended to criminalize not the infringement, but the method of infringement.

A more sophisticated file-sharing service that allowed users to post video works of their own creation as well as clips of protected works prompted another knee-jerk attempt to quash new developments on the web. In 2007, Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, M.T.V., Nickelodeon, and Paramount, sued YouTube and its owner Google for no less than a billion dollars for facilitating infringements of its rights.

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