Defending Fair Use in the Age of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

This article describes the efforts of the authors to challenge the limits placed on Fair Use by the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Increasing DMCA-backed corporate control over the use of digital media has limited educators' ability to teach effectively. The DMCA allows for a triennial challenge to the restrictions on copying media, an elaborate process which the authors successfully negotiated in order to secure an exemption. Communication, film studies, and media studies professors may now circumvent encryption on DVDs and other digital media in their departmental libraries for use in teaching. Narrow as this exemption may be, it nevertheless joins efforts of educators and filmmakers to protect fair use.