The Public Interest and the Information Superhighway: The Digital Future Coalition (1996–2002) and the Afterlife of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Digital Future Coalition (1996–2002) was an unprecedented public interest coalition on internet and copyright policy with much farther-ranging effects than has been recognized previously. Uniting commercial and noncommercial stakeholders to push back against intellectual property maximalism on the nascent internet, it altered both treaty and legislative language, entered a trope (“balance”) into national discourse on copyright policy, blocked US copyright protection for databases, enhanced popular engagement with fair use, and set the stage for the Right to Repair movement. This historical research was accomplished primarily by interviewing representatives of the Digital Future Coalition (DFC) and opposing groups, as well as one ex-official, and by consulting a hitherto-untapped private archive of documents relevant to the prehistory and 1996–2002 history of the DFC.