On October 8, 1998, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, fundamentally rewiring the legal architecture of the nascent web. Conceived in an era when legacy entertainment giants panicked over MP3s and early file sharing, the legislation attempted to freeze intellectual property protections in federal amber. Yet its most enduring legacy wasn’t its draconian anti-circumvention clauses—which still bedevil cybersecurity researchers and the Right to Repair movement—but rather Section 512's "safe harbor" provisions. By immunizing hosts from immediate liability for user-generated copyright infringement, lawmakers accidentally minted the cornerstone of Web 2.0. Without that liability shield, platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and modern cloud infrastructure would have been choked by preemptive litigation before ever leaving the garage. A law built to preserve old media ended up underwriting the modern internet.