The United States passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 as part of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Broadly, the DMCA prohibits hardware and software anti-circumvention tools, such as reading an encrypted optical disc. For both video game hardware manufacturers and for software developers and publishers, this helps to protect their work from being copied, disassembled, and reincorporated into a clone.