The Cato Institute, an ultra-libertarian, right-wing think tank, has released a white paper damning the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking the anti-copying systems used to cripple digital media, like DVDs and iTunes songs.
It's amazing to watch crippleware come under attack from all points of the compass — Marxists and anarchists hate DRM. Libertarians hate DRM. Media studies people, economists, and musicians hate DRM.
But it takes sharp free-market types like the Cato characters to bust out elegant critiques like this one:
The movie industry has every right to segment the worldwide market for DVDs, but it
should bear the costs of doing so. Those
costs might include requiring no-resale contracts with distributors and monitoring sales
in low-price countries to make sure DVDs
were not being resold outside their intended
market. Deciding whether those costs would
be worthwhile might be difficult. The indus-
try's desire for market segmentation is not,
however, a good reason to outlaw the sale of
unofficial DVD players. The role of government is not to ensure that a private business's
pricing strategy succeeds, and consumers,
who have not agreed to help enforce the DVD
cartel's segmentation scheme, are under no
obligation to respect it.
I've heard for years that the Cato Institute was divided on DRM and copyright, so it's good to seem them taking a stand now. I think they've only scratched the surface, though. Of special interest to free-marketeers should be the way that DRM lets Apple hijack the music companies' copyright monopoly and turn it into a tax on Apple customers who switch from an iPod to a competing product. You can keep your MP3s if you switch from Windows to Mac, but if you switch from iPod to Creative, kiss your iTunes goodbye. Talk about anti-competitive!
And how about TiVo updating its devices to cripple them after their customers have already paid for them? Or Macrovision using its monopoly over DVD anti-analog tech to jack up its licensing prices to the movie industry? If you like free markets, DRM are a nightmare from top to bottom.
(via Michael Geist)
