The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was law makers response to the rapid upraise to digital piracy via Napster. Unfortunately the annex to copyright law left many holes witch corporations have been using to unjustly bring litigation on people as well as curb some of the basic civil rights witch no American should want to see lost.
The advent of the internet started a revolution in how people shared knowledge and communicated world wide. It is not uncommon for any typical person to get on a computer and communicate, in real time non-the-less, with someone on the other side of the globe. Such efficient and easy means of world wide communication was impossible twenty years ago. Impractical ten years ago.
Though there is a darker side to this revolution. Digital piracy has plagued the computer industry since the invention of the personal computer. It was only until the late nineties that computers became powerful enough to replicate the same quality of audio/video that they could replace analog standards that the recording and motion picture industries felt the sting of digital piracy.
Unlike analog copies, digital copies do not degrade with time, and produce flawless copies every time. In the beginning it was very hard to find pirated material on the internet. If a website was found to contain copyrighted material, and did not have the explicit permission of the copyright owner, they were sent a cease and desist notification. If the site did not comply they would be shut down. They were not able to shut down pirate sites that were located out of countries in which the companies operated and held copyrights for the material. It wasn?t until the implementation of large scale peer-to-peer networks, Napster of which was the most infamous. Instead of having one central target...