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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.
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 is libertarian. CATO's consistent criticism against interventionism and the drug war hardly puts them in the mainstream of right-wing conservatism.
Its http://www.cato.org/about/about.html actually more of a libertarian group. And libertarians favor less goverment control (more so than republicans.)
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.
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.
Quiz & explanation (PDF file)
It's "The Cato Institute" http://www.cato.org/about/about.html. 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.
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.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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.
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.