news analysis Whether YouTube suffers the same fate as Napster may depend on the wording of a nearly antique law written long before video-sharing Web sites were envisioned.

The law is, of course, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which made its appearance in the U.S. Congress in July 1997.

That was a year marked by the arrival of Apple’s Mac OS 8, Microsoft shares increasing in price by 150 percent annually, and Amazon.com holding its initial public offering. High-speed connections that enable video sharing were a luxury, and the Internet’s total population hovered around 19 million people.

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