Anti-circumvention misuse

Content owners in the United States received an anticircumvention entitlement in the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, and recent language in a European Union directive promises the equivalent to European content holders. In the United States, the statute was touted as legislation necessary to fulfill international treaty. However, such protection would already have been provided under the doctrine of contributory infringement, which attributes copyright liability to providers of technical devices that lack a substantial non-infringing use. This provision of U.S. law could have been employed against provision of so-called "black box" devices intended to circumvent technological protections. Instead, lobbying by content industries resulted in the enactment of so-called "implementing" legislation containing anti-circumvention provisions that far exceed anything contemplated by the treaty Starkly put, the DMCA creates a new and unprecedented right to control access to copyrighted works.