What the PC Industry Tells Us about the DMCA

by on April 25, 2006

The Heartland Institute’s IT&T News has published my latest article on the DMCA:

Intel, which manufactured the processors at the heart of the first PCs, encountered the same kind of unauthorized competition in its platform in the early 1990s. Several companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, began producing chips that could run software designed for Intel chips. The result has been rapid innovation and constantly falling prices in the market for processors.

In short, intra-platform competition among the likes of Intel and AMD has contributed even more to innovation in the PC industry than inter-platform competition between Windows and Macintosh. The law ought not to stand in the way of analogous competition in the market for digital media devices. An entrepreneur who wants to compete with the iPod by building an MP3 player that works with the iTunes Music Store should not be prevented from doing so by copyright law. Yet that is precisely what the DMCA does.

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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