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Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been a landmark legislation in USA to protect copyright in digital products. It could well be the guiding force for similar legislation in India where an "Optical Disk Protection Act" is being considered. It is therefore necessary to take note some of the  developments in USA where DMCA has been applied in an aggressive manner and often infuriated the common public. The shutting down of the Napster peer to peer file sharing service is a thing of the past. The arrest of Dmitry Sklyrov the Russian programmer of Elcomsoft is also some thing which pitch forked the DMCA into global attention.

Now two incidents in USA have brought the focus back on DMCA.

In the first incident, two websites focussing on Apple Macintosh operating system related discussions were served notices under DMCA and are reportedly shut down for a review of all discussion forums. The charge was that the discussion forums contained discussions on how to use copyrighted software on Apple systems after breaking the locks.

In another incident, a Company which was reprogramming mobile hand sets locked to one company and releasing them for secondary sales. This was  an action for injunctive relief and damages arising out of SOL groups infringment of TracFone's trademarks and other rights in wireless telephones made by Nokia for TracFone to enable consumers to use TracFone's prepaid wireless service . It was alleged that SOL group was engaged in an unauthorized and illegal wireless telephone business dependent on handset or phone software computer hacking, the alteration of TracFone's proprietary handset or phone software computer code, infringement of TracFone's trademarks etc.

These incidents highlight the potential of DMCA to affect a wide ranging activities some of which are perhaps not intended in the original act. If and when India decides to adopt a law similar to DMCA, one needs to be aware of this undesirable consequences which are more in support of preserving "Monopoly Business Rights" rather than providing protection to genuine "Authors" or "Creators".