It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM).

The DMCA's principal innovation in the field of copyright is the exemption from direct and indirect liability of Internet service providers and other intermediaries.

[3] In establishing this, the lawmakers also recognized this would have a negative impact on fair use without exceptions, with electronic works potentially falling into the public domain but still locked beyond circumvention measures, but they also needed to balance the rights of copyright holders.

Exemptions are granted when it is shown that access-control technology has had a substantial adverse effect on the ability of people to make non-infringing uses of copyrighted works.

[22] Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School points out that the rulemaking is a complicated, ad hoc, and unduly burdensome process.

[23] Professors Andrea M. Matwyshyn, Steven M. Bellovin, Matt Blaze, J. Alex Halderman, and Nadia Heninger, jointly advocated making the security research exemption granted in the 2015 Triennial Section 1201 Rulemaking permanent.

[24] The Learning Disabilities Association of America (LDA) commented that circumventing DRM restrictions to meet accessibility needs deserves a permanent exception.

He argued that DeCSS, as computer code, was protected as free speech, and the DMCA allowed users to make copies of media they legally owned.

They also pointed out that customers purchasing a Chamberlain garage door opener did not sign an end user license agreement waiving those rights.

However, the appeals court pointed out that Lexmark failed to include an anti-circumvention device that "effectively controls access" to the printer lockout program.

[50] In July 2002, American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on the behalf of Benjamin Edelman, a computer researcher at Berkman Center for Internet and Society, seeking a declaratory judgment to affirm his first amendment rights when reverse engineering the censorware product of defendant N2H2 in case he intended to publish the finding.

[52] On March 13, 2007, Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its corporate parent Google for copyright infringement seeking more than $1 billion in damages.

The court did uphold the ruling that YouTube could not be held liable based on "general knowledge" that users on its site were infringing copyright.

The case was sent back to the District Court in New York,[56] and on April 18, 2013, Judge Stanton issued another order granting summary judgment in favor of YouTube.

The ruling judge disagreed with the argument, stating that Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users.

[59] Even though Veoh won the court case, it blamed the litigation as one of the causes of its preparing to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy and its subsequent sale to Qlipso.

[62] In May 2008, a federal district judge in Washington State Autodesk's authorized that the software's license agreement preempted the seller from his rights under the first-sale doctrine.

[73] Google asserted misuse of the DMCA in a filing concerning New Zealand's copyright act,[74][75] quoting results from a 2005 study by California academics Laura Quilter and Jennifer Urban based on data from the Chilling Effects clearinghouse.

"[77] Currently, there are three main abuses of the DMCA: The use of DMCA-enabled takedown notices has been raised for a number of services that allow users to provide content.

However, some still saw legal challenges, such as MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. (2005) based on the fact they were operated commercially and promoted the ability to share copyrighted works.

Following a copyright infringement complaint filed on legal archive Lumen and without checking the veracity of the source, Google delisted the Project Brazen article.

[85] It has been suggested that had the DMCA not prevented access to the software "... a researcher with legal access to Volkswagen's software could have discovered the code that changed how the cars behave in testing ..."[86] Analog Copy Protection (ACP), the encryption technology created by Rovi Corporation (formerly Macrovision, now TiVo), is designed to thwart users' attempts to reproduce content via analog cables.

When a DVD is played through an analog video cable and recorded using a VCR, Rovi's ACP technology will distort the copy partially or completely.

The DMCA has been criticized for forcing all producers of analog video equipment to support the proprietary copy protection technology of Rovi Corporation, a commercial firm.

The arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov in 2001, for alleged infringement of the DMCA, was a highly publicized example of the law's use to prevent or penalize development of anti-DRM measures.

Though Amazon will, sometimes, remove works that violates their terms of service after they get complaints, they're happy to sell the books and reap the profits until they get such a notice.

Rick Boucher, a congressman from Virginia, led previous efforts by introducing the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA).

A fundamental change in his language would be to support "notice and stay down" for service providers, requiring them to take measures to prevent material that has already been determined to be violating copyright to be re-uploaded by users.

While the draft was praised by the entertainment industry, free speech advocacy groups feared the language would require services to employ automatic filtering and would further limit freedom of expression.

[104] They document that the DMCA: In July 2016, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the US government in Green v. Department of Justice alleging that Section 1201 violates the First Amendment.