Competition and Copyright

In March 2006, the Cato Institute published Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by Timothy B. Lee.

From the Executive Summary:

The DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act] 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 [Digital Rights Management] technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

More recently, he noted on Ars Technica that the RIAA seems to want the universities to do its dirty work.