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The year of the music licensing legal wars
When the Supreme Court decided against Grokster in 2004, it changed the internet forever.
And in the court’s strenuous efforts to walk that fine line between the iPod and the RIAA, it shamelessly made up an entire copyright law doctrine without batting an eye, a theory of liability that hadn’t existed up until that point in time. For tech industry lawyers and internet freedom types at the time, the passage of the DMCA — with its legal restrictions on bypassing DRM and its loophole-riddled safe harbor regime which allowed platforms to evade liability for hosting copyrighted material so long as they took it down upon notice — was a crushing defeat. The spooky uncertainty of Grokster drove platforms straight into the arms of the DMCA safe harbor provision, which kept the copyright lawyers away so long as they were given bureaucratic systems which allowed notices of infringement to be sent and content to be taken down.
Or read this on The Verge
