In early October 1998, Congress reached a compromise on legislation intended to protect copyright in cyberspace. President Clinton signed the legislation in late October 1998. The new law makes it illegal to circumvent encryption used to protect intellectual property on the Internet, with a penalty of US$2,500 per instance.
Proponents of the new legislation insist that it will jump-start ecommerce. Those who oppose the law argue that ecommerce growth will come at the expense of academics and consumers because of changes to the fair-use doctrine.
Prior to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it was never a crime to access a protected work; it was a crime to misuse the information by illegal copying. Under the new legislation, merely accessing protected material is illegal. “What we are worried about here is that we have for the first time a prohibition on simply accessing information,” Adam Eisgrau of the American Library Association told the New York Times in an October 28, 1998 article. “In the past, the law has punished you on how you used that information.”
Consumer advocates and academic researchers are worried that the new law will allow copyright holders to institute a pay-per-view model on works that are traditionally available for use in libraries at no charge. Proponents of the legislation say that problem is addressed through an appeals process. If someone finds that they no longer have access to materials they formerly enjoyed under the fair-use doctrine, they can appeal to the Library of Congress for an exemption.
In 1998, Congress for the first time enacted a law that is designed specifically to protect corporate copyright. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CTEA) extends the term of most copyrights by 20 years. Under the last copyright law, original works were protected in the United States for a period of 50 years after the author’s death. Corporate authors and works published before 1978 are protected for 75 years.
Supporters of the CTEA — including the film and music industries and some (but not all) book publishers — argue that the copyright extension was necessary to bring American protections to parity with European law. Detractors assert that the law is intended solely to protect the interests of multinational corporations like the Walt Disney Company and restricts the flow of information and the wealth of work in the public domain.
Copyright, as defined in Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution, gives Congress the authority to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” By extending the copyright term retroactively, Congress is giving copyright owners more than the “limited term” specified in the Constitution.