CATO Institute Releases Paper Criticizing DMCA

flanksteak writes "The CATO institute has published a paper criticizing the DMCA entitled 'The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.' From the article: '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.'" A report worth taking a look at that puts into words what most of us know already.

Re:hehe

[InfiniteWisdom]

The CATO institute is a libertarian think tank. Libertarianism falls into the left wing of the traditional classification of politial thought in some ways and right wing in others.

CATO conservative? Right-wing?

[Anonymous Coward]

CATO is libertarian. CATO's consistent criticism against interventionism and the drug war hardly puts them in the mainstream of right-wing conservatism.

Re:All aboard.

[stewie's deuce]

Its http://www.cato.org/about/about.html [cato.org] actually more of a libertarian group. And libertarians favor less goverment control (more so than republicans.)

Re:CATO?

[centie]

Well, according to http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42525-20 05Feb21?language=printer [washingtonpost.com]

Nowadays, Cato alumni are everywhere in the Bush administration and in groups advancing the president's Social Security initiative. Former Cato analyst Andrew G. Biggs is an associate commissioner of the Social Security Administration. The director of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, Derrick A. Max, previously worked for Abdnor (when she was at Cato) and for Weaver (when she was at the American Enterprise Institute)...

..and theres several more. So I'd think this is at least likely to be noticed by politicians and the media, if they take any notice or not is a different matter though..

"Left versus right."

[Captain Scurvy]

Cato is to the right. Cato promotes free market (i.e., classical) liberalism. Main stream conservatism, otherwise known as neoconservatism, is a mish-mash of collectivism with some vague lip-service to (classical) liberalism thrown in. Have a look at some of the writings by F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, et al. These are your right-wingers. Compare these writings to the writings of Irving Kristol, who started the neoconservative movement. They are ideologically incompatible.

Re:hehe

[MyNymWasTaken]

Libertarianism falls into the left wing [...] in some ways and right wing in others.

Or better put, it's completely tangential to both. Left (Liberal) vs. right (Conservative) isn't useful, much less accurate, when talking about the border case Libertarian & Statist philosophies. More appropriate is a 4-point diamond with Libertarian & Statist opposite of each other and perpendicular to Liberal & Conservative; with Centrists in the middle.

Take the World's Smallest Political Quiz [theadvocates.org].

Quiz & explanation [theadvocates.org] (PDF file)

Libertarians support a great deal of liberty and freedom of choice in both personal and economic matters. They believe government's only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence. They value individual responsibility, and tolerate economic and social diversity.

Left-Liberals generally embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but support central decision-making in economics. They want the government to help the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for what they might describe as "economic equality."

Right-Conservatives favor freedom of choice on economic issues, but want official standards in personal matters. They tend to support the free market, but frequently want the government to defend the community from what they see as threats to morality or to the traditional family structure.

Centrists favor selective government intervention and emphasize what they commonly describe as "practical solutions" to current problems. They tend to keep an open mind on political issues. Many centrists feel that government serves as a check on excessive liberty.

Statists want government to have a great deal of control over individuals and society. They support centralized planning, and often doubt whether liberty and freedom of choice are practical options. At the very bottom of the chart, left-authoritarians are usually called socialists, while right-authoritarians are generally called fascists.

It's not CATO...

[posterlogo]

It's "The Cato Institute" http://www.cato.org/about/about.html [cato.org]. CATO doesn't spell out anything. It's "Cato", named after "Cato's Letters" -- used as anonymous treatises pro-American Revolution by some founding fathers, named after an ancient Roman "Cato", who wrote against tyranny and oppression in his day and age.

Re:In the end, it won't make much difference

[mdielmann]

I have to say, I read both pages you linked to (at least where they started talking about intellectual property), and I can't say I disagree with him, at least from an economic standpoint. If you have a moral objection to IP, he probably won't sway you much. Let's look at a few of his statements.

"Whether we protect intellectual property as an inalienable right or as a privilege vouchsafed by the sovereign, such protection inevitably entails making some choices that have crucial implications for the balance we strike between the interests of those who innovate and those who would benefit from innovation." A balance between the benefit of society and the benefit of the inventor? I can live with that. I have no problem with giving someone enough time to make good on their idea before all the me-toos jump on the bandwagon. Where that balance lies is the crucial thing, though.

"Of particular current relevance to our economy overall is the application of property right protection to information technology. A noticeable component of the surge in the trend growth of the economy in recent years arguably reflects the synergy of laser and fiber optic technologies in the 1960s and 1970s." Uh oh, he's talking about IP in the IT world, almost sounds scary. But his next statement is about hardware, and highly technical hardware no less. This is the closest he gets to talking about software patents. I'd love to hear him address that issue specifically, but so far, I can't disagree. IT has often piggy-backed on the IP of other areas, most notably because it's usually implemented as an abstract (virtual, if you prefer) version of a physical object. Other times it's because of the improvements of physical items that has increased the capacity of equipment used in the IT world.

"The dramatic gains in information technology have markedly improved the ability of businesses to identify and address incipient economic imbalances before they inflict significant damage. These gains reflect new advances in both the physical and the conceptual realms. It is imperative to find the appropriate intellectual property regime for each." That sounds suspiciously like "IP needs different protections for physical inventions versus conceptual inventions, and different rules may apply" to me. Again, an astute observation, and more obvious from an economic standpoint than most others. The IT world behaves differently than much of the physical world - why would we expect treating them the same to work without problems?

That's just a few of the things he has to say. I strongly recommend anyone who is concerned about IP, especially the economic impact of IP, read that speech. He's pointing the way to both criteria to test if IP law is effective, and means to formulate a solution to any problems found in IP law. If you can't get rid of IP law altogether (and I'm not sure I want to), at least arguments like his could guide us towards a more rational implementation. And all in an economic fashion, which matters far more to government than opinions, feelings, or ideals these days.

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[account_deleted]

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CATO is a MAJOR Washington DC think tank

[fortinbras47]

Exactlty how important is CATO in the scheme of things. Will this report reach the ears of politicians / mass media, or will it go largely unnoticed except by slashdot? I don't think we are going to see the DMCA revoked unless the public cares enough to put pressure on their representatives, and honestly the public isn't informed enough to care. So will this report help mobize people or are they just preaching to the choir?

They are THE libertarian think tank and one of the top think tanks in the nation. (Some other top think tanks are Hoover Institution, Heritage, AEI, and Brookings)

People on the more libertarian side of the Republican party will take it seriously. Personally, I love CATO, but many people will dismiss anything CATO does out of hand because they are libertarian. They are for legalization of drugs, private accounts for Social Security, Health Savings Accounts, school vouchers, repeal of Health Information Privacy Act, etc...

As I said, they are read and respected, but libertarians and people sympathetic to more libertarian ideas are (unfortunately IMHO) a small percentage of congress and the population.

Re:Pirates

[Haeleth]

I wish people would stop calling people who share software, pirates.

People don't call people who share software "pirates". Nobody accuses RMS or Linus Torvalds of piracy. The people we call pirates are the people who make unlicensed copies of other people's software, which is not exactly "sharing" in the neighbourly sense.

As for calling people who make unlicensed copies of other people's work "pirates", well, according to the SOED in front of me, people have been using the noun "pirate" to mean "someone who infringes on the copyright of another" since 1701, and the verb "pirate" to mean "to appropriate or reproduce the work or invention of another without authority" since at least 1706. So, no - given that we've been using the word that way for at least 300 years, I rather doubt we're going to stop now.

Re:All aboard.

[troll -1]

True it was non partisan. But mostly democrats by a small margin IIRC. Though it was really bought and paid for by the entertainment industry.

And this man [house.gov] is guiltly of malfeasance. Between 1997 and 1998 he accepted over $50,000 [opensecrets.org] from the entertainment industry in exchange for indroducing the DMCA to Congress. It's what Ralf Nader calls legalized bribery. You give us money, we'll support your bill. Oh the madness of it!

Re:CATO conservative? Right-wing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cato Group is right-libertarian, as opposed to left-libertarianism. Right-libertarianism is very pro-corporate, whereas left-libertarianism is very anti-corporate. ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-Libertarianism/ [wikipedia.org] ).

On the topic of DRM circumvention

[From A Far Away Land]

I recently came into possession of a free iPod Shuffle, and since I was away from home I put it on my laptop at work. I learned a day later that you can only install iTunes onto one computer otherwise it will try to delete the music you've put on the iPod from the other computer.

Thinking that was a pretty crappy way to operate something that should be as easy to add music to as copying files though My Computer to the iPod removable drive, I did a google search that would be illegal in the United States of America.

I came up with this:
software that operates the Shuffle without running iTunes [agoraphobeus.free.fr] *
which allows me to copy music to my iPod and generate a playlist without iTunes messing up my life.
*Offer void in the United States of America. Turnabout from the infamous [at least in the Rest of the World] "Offer void outside of the USA" is pretty sweet I do say so myself.

Re:Pirates

[NeutronCowboy]

And you still missed the point why this fight to recenter the word is important. I won't plagiarize my own post from about 2 seconds ago, but the point is that piracy has an emotional baggage to it that the RIAA/MPAA are taking advantage of. Copyright infringement doesn't. Which is why its important that this gets repeated everywhere and everytime.

So - repeat after me. Copyright infringement is not piracy. Copyright infringement is not piracy. Copyright infringement is not piracy. Now, go forth and spread the word. Maybe one day we'll be able to shift this debate back to where it belongs - into the realm of copyright law.

Re:All aboard.

[takeya]

The Cato people really are bonafide libertarians actually.

Anti-government, pro-consensual society.
As economists, they dislike the root causes for inflation, and the fact that the fed has one private bank print all our money.

Conservatives tend to love it when the government controls things like money and marriage and drugs.