← Glossary Term
DMCA
A US copyright law from 1998, now central to fights over AI companies scraping the web.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the US law behind the takedown notices you see on YouTube. It also contains a separate and increasingly important section on anti-circumvention, which makes it illegal to get around a technical measure protecting copyrighted work. That part was written with DVD copy protection in mind.
In 2026 it turned up in AI cases for an unexpected reason. Arguing that a company broke a lock is often easier than arguing about fair use, so websites suing AI firms over scraping have started reaching for anti-circumvention instead of straight copyright infringement.
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