The Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA was brought into law in the US in 1998.
By implementing two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization it criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works.
In short, in seeks to prevent the diseminination, by any means, of original copyrighted works by anyone but the copyright holder.
This includes piracy (obviously), copying videos or DVD’s.

It’s legal to make a copy of any form of media you own, for personal use. However, it is technically not legal to circumvent copy protection measures.
Since these are routinely used on almost all digital media, most people seem to assume the personal use clause no longer exists.

Video clips from any movie can be used when creating another video, and this is most often seen on platforms such as Youtube.
However such use often causes those videos to be claimed by the original content creator, even when usage falls within the realm of fair use.

Music sampling, if the result is either sold or placed online, will be a target for litigation, as sampled songs became so popular, remixing so much older music, the copyright holders of that music started taking the samplers to court
Sometimes these cases resulted in them demanding all of the profits Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., US Courts Split On Legality Of Music Sampling., 5 Music Copyright Cases Every Songwriter Should Know About

One thing it set out to do was remove fair use, because fair use isn’t profitable.
I own a good number of DVDs. If the full force of the DMCA were allowed to take hold I would be forced to replace my entire collection each time technology advanced to the point my current collection became unusable. This happened to my audio cassettes, and to my video tapes (although both of those wore out through re-use, so we’ren’t that good anyway).

Some things, like my BBC Shakespeare play DVD boxset, can’t be so easily replaced. Others got their soundtracks replaced because obtaining the rights to the original music used again would cost too much for such obscure shows.
If they get re-released at all, why do this when there’s streaming now.
Much better to have a reguler income from customers who will be impressed by ‘hundreds of shows available’, but likely only watch the new ones.

Without private copy rights, Lots of these shows wouldn’t be available. Once streaming replaces personal ownership completely, there won’t be any option to flick through your old collection. That has more appeal than you might think.
Mind you, DVD itself is a dead format, private digital copies are the future, and I think this is what most concerns copyright protection people, since digital copies can be shared.
However, so could filmstock (more on this later), and audiotape, then videotape and DVD. None of that, including online piracy, has brought down the music, movie or television industries. Producing terrible content no-one’s interested in buying’s done most of the harm.

One of the groups that wield the DMCA most is Hollywood, using it to protect their movies, (currently, for some bizarre reason, from being used in Youtube videos which would actually raise the profile of their products, but I don’t get how they work, which they either take over, monetise or take down).
Disney in particular have had US Copyright extended specifically to enable them to retain ownership of their Mickey Mouse character. Loads of content would now be in the public domain were it not for Disney’s desire to retain ownership of the mouse.

What’s really interesting is how Hollywood started. A group of film makers ran all the way to California (a long distance at the time) to get away from this guy, Thomas Edison, and his fim camera patents and copyrights, because his rights enforcement was so severe it prevented them from making any significant profit.

Yet at the same time Edison took the entire catalogue of pioneering french film maker Georges Méliès, now known as the pioneer of film special effects, inventing many of those we know today more than a hundred years ago.
By releasing his entire catalogue of movies and taking credit, he stole millions of dollars from Méliès. Lacking the financial buffer this would have given him this, among too many pressures to list here, caused him to die bankrupt Wikipedia page on Méliès

One could make the argument the DMCA exist because the US has learned from their mistakes, but as these mistakes seem to be ongoing, with the oppression of new artists, and software developers trying to create innovative products, I doubt this the case.
Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, in spite of being a billionaire, has filed patent and copyright infringement cases against Apple, AOL, Facebook, Google, and anyone his definitely not a patent troll company can find who might be infringing on one of the many thousands of patents they’ve managed to buy up.
Since buying thousands of vaguely worded software patents and then suing companies with them is exactly how patent trolls behave, it’s kind of difficult to think this isn’t exactly what they are.

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Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International by Dr Carey Pridgeon 2020
(Licence does not cover linked images owned by other content creators)