The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (or the DMCA) was enacted in 1998 by Bill Clinton to try to help regulate and deal with copyright challenges in the digital world. Without even registering work, once a person creates something, they have the intellectual rights over it and if they feel someone has violated that, they can send a DMCA takedown notice to the site's owner (or if they refuse, their hosting provider). If the hosting provider finds a person's claims legitimate, they can disable access to the site take down the infringing content. If a person receives a counter-notification saying that there was no copyright infringement, then the first person needs to file a lawsuit within 14 days and ensure that they have registered their intellectual property before going to court.
Out of Country Application:
While it doesn't apply outside the U.S., anyone who owns a site that is hosted in the U.S. can receive takedown notices. Furthermore, most sites hosted in one of over the 200 countries who have signed the World Intellectual Property Organizations Treaty are subject to DMCA takedown notices.
Exceptions:
The exceptions to the use of copyrighted material (called "Fair Use") are news reporting, commentary, research, criticism, scholarship, and teaching. The factors considered when determining whether something is "Fair Use" are the nature of the copyrighted content, whether the purpose of the usage is educational, the amount of copyrighted work a person used, and how it will impact the value of the copyrighted content.
This is a very informative blog! How does pirating work then? And why is it so easy for me to watch movies on 123movies, when almost everyone knows about the site? Why hasn't it been taken down?
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