The libertarian Cato Institute has just released a paper on America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Its site says:
Why won't iTunes play on Rio MP3 players? Why are viewers forced to sit through previews on some DVDs when they could have fast-forwarded through them on video? Why is it impossible to cut and paste text on Adobe eBook? In a just released study for the Cato Institute, Tim Lee, a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, answers these questions and more.
The problem at the root of all of these annoyances, writes Lee in "Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," is Congressional interference in the market for digital rights management technologies.
You can download a 159K PDF of the paper from that page.
Comment: It's American legislation, of course. The problem is that the unpleasant consequences hurt consumers in the rest of the world too.... and it seems only the French have the guts to say non ;-)
