The U.S. Copyright Office, a part of the Library of Congress, issued a final rule adopting exemptions to the provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) that prohibits circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The DMCA was enacted in 1998 to implement various elements of…
The third element of a criminal prosecution for copyright infringement requires that the government establish that the defendant possessed criminal intent to infringe the holder’s copyrighted work. Courts generally agree that a “willful” act must be “an act intentionally done in violation of the law.” However, in defining willfulness when…
The principal criminal statute protecting copyrighted works is 17 U.S.C. § 506(a), which provides that “[a]ny person who infringes a copyright willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain” shall be punished as provided in 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Section 2319 provides, in pertinent part, that a 5-year…
Historically, copyright protection had been provided through a dual system under which the federal government, by statute, provided limited monopolies for intellectual property concurrently with state statutory and common laws that established roughly equivalent protections. In 1976, Congress fundamentally changed this system by introducing a single, preemptive federal statutory scheme.…
The law of copyright is codified at Title 17 of the United States Code. The principal prohibitions relating to criminal copyright infringement are set forth at 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) and 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Titles 17 and 18 also contain a number of other provisions that make illegal certain…