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This week, Jerry Pournelle writes:



Three Years of the DMCA



You will find the Electronic Freedom Foundation report at http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequences.pdf. It's depressing. The Digital Millennium Communications Act has been expensive, and most of its effects have been unintended. It didn't accomplish what it said it was intended to do, and it has harmed commerce and the growth of the industry. So what else is new?



Bob Thompson says the purpose of the DMCA was to get us used to prior restraint censorship, and it has done that well: Look at the fear generated by the act.



And every month the movie studios and the music publishers come up with another mad scheme to make copy protection more obtrusive, with heavier criminal penalties for getting around even stupid copy protection, and no concern whatever for matters such as free speech, fair use, or for that matter, the protection of the rights of authors and artists. All the new bills in Congress seem aimed at extending the rights of corporations to Mickey Mouse and similar creations of authors already dead, and none at making the corporations renegotiate often brutally confiscatory contracts that leave the actual creators and their families with little to nothing.



The Constitution allows for the creation of monopolies as a means of encouraging creative activity. I don't see how anyone is given an incentive to do more creating by having a copyright extended long after the artist's death -- particularly when the artist is already dead, and the copyright is held by a corporation. But once again, corporate interests are represented by big law and lobby firms. The public doesn't have such assets.
All this, again, illustrates why I distrust government intervention in the marketplace. It is inevitably destructive to that marketplace, something not recognized by those who keep crying for more and more government regulation, especially that proposed by Disney's Senator. Even Adam Smith knew that, a long time ago.

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