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by jacurtis 2335 days ago
According to the 2nd sentence on Wikipedia, which describes DCMA:

> [DCMA] 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). It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.

While I initially thought (like many others on here) that DCMA was to keep you from spreading copyright content or passing it off as your own, the true purpose of DCMA is actually to criminalize the act of circumventing DRM. Access control on a social network I guess is considered a type of DRM for the content within the network (which, lest we not forget, is wholly owned by Instagram as soon as you post it). It specifically states that circumventing access control is a violation, regardless of whether any copyright was actually infringed upon.

So from my keyboard lawyer perspective, it seems like Instagram is actually within their rights here.

[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...)

3 comments

The point of the parent comment is not that the DMCA doesn't cover anti-circumvention, but rather than the DMCA contains many parts, and only the copyright content part has a safe Harbor and takedown notice provision.

The claim you're arguing against isn't that the DMCA doesn't cover this. The claim is that the DMCA takedown process doesn't apply to all infringements of the DMCA, only those of copyright wrt safe harbor.

They don't own the copyright to what you post, you grant them a perpetual license to distribute it.
Problem is, why now. These kind of violations are not new. Too little too late