If you sell your creative works online, familiarity with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) is almost obligatory as it is one of the main ways in which copyrighted material can be protected on the Internet.
The DMCA was added to the Copyright Act in 1998 in part as a response to the growth of the Internet and the very real difficulties copyright owners encounter when their products are instantly available to the world via the web. Think about it; back in the olden days, if you made an original, creative piece of art, the chances that someone 5,000 miles away would even see it, let alone be able to copy it, were remote. Nowadays, when you post something on a public website, you are giving a global community instant access to your work which will inevitably lead to instances of infringement.
Also consider the copyright implications for Internet service providers, search engines and web browsers. Since it violates copyright to distribute or publicly display a protected work without permission, prior to the DMCA, sites like Etsy, Google, Amazon, etc. could have faced tremendous copyright liability for their roles in hosting images or content that may have be infringing. Even if you were not the one that uploaded an infringing item, as the copyright laws were written, you could still be held responsible if you hosted the illegal work.
Enter the DMCA: Congress’ attempt to address both the rights of creators and the rights of websites that host content.
The DMCA contains a bunch of provisions that are not crucial for our purposes so we won’t go into them. The part of the DMCA that matters most to crafters and artists who sell their wares on venues such as Etsy is called the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act - or “OCILLA” for short. This long title pretty much describes exactly what this section of the DMCA does: for Online Service Providers, or those companies which, for instance, allow their users to upload their own content, the OCILLA limits the potential for them to be sued for copyright infringement and also provides a distinct list of steps for copyright owners to take in order to keep their work from being distributed or copied illegally on these sites.
The DMCA was and is the most substantial change to copyright law in the United States since the Copyright Act of 1976. While the DMCA is far from perfect but it is the system in which we must operate as artists and crafters in the Internet age. In upcoming posts we will take a look at how to use the DMCA and what service providers like Etsy have to do to avoid being sued for infringement.