Cato Calls For DMCA Repeal

Cato may be the softest voice in the Right Wing Noise Machine. They tend to actually believe what they say. They tend to lose arguments with the corporate wing of the GOP, then get shoved to the front when new inspiration is needed.

Still, it is significant that Cato has now come out for scrapping the DMCA. Timothy Lee, who works for the Show-Me Institute in Missouri, has a Cato position paper out that speaks as clearly as I have ever done about the pernicious effects of the law:

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders and the technology companies that distribute their content the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

The full text (PDF warning) of  Lee's analysis urgest that policy-making in this area be given back to the courts, and that the 1998 law be simply repealed. This is typical Cato. Ask for the impossible and then provide an unworkable replacement.

And yet...

The result of the Copyright Wars is to disadvantage America against growing competitive threats. Our Internet has been crippled, our lawyers are making money while our technologists are going hungry, and artists are no better off than they were.

The DMCA was the product of a Corporate Copyright era that began with sound movies, expanded into mass market recordings, and achieved pre-eminence in the era of television. the result is that a very small number of companies control the intellectual wealth of the country. They are just like the British mills of the early Steam Age, which sought to control all aspects of technology and wound up losing-out to new nations, like America, which ignored those restrictions, took what they couldn't buy, and innovated on top of it.

That's what China is doing, it's what India is doing, it's what Brazil is doing. Until we recognize that the key to the future lies in the new, not the old, these companies will continue to pass us. We will be left in the dustbin of history. And we will deserve that fate.