When organizations all around the political spectrum can agree a law is broken, you’d think that would lead to quick passage of the bill to fix it. Unless that law is the DMCA’s anticircumvention.

The Libertarian Cato Institute has released a terrific report (PDF link) documenting ways the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hinders innovation:

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 new legislation’s most profound
effects will be on the evolution of digital media
technologies. We have grown accustomed to,
and benefit from, a high-tech world that is
freewheeling, open-ended, and fiercely competitive.
Silicon Valley is a place where upstarts
like Apple, Netscape, and Google have gone
from two-man operations to billion-dollar
trendsetters seemingly overnight. The DMCA
threatens to undermine that competitive spirit
by giving industry incumbents a powerful
legal weapon against new entrants.

Sound copyright policy has obvious attractions for advocates of small-government and deregulation. Copyright has become more regulatory and more market-crippling as it expands, and the DMCA is a case in point. As Lee describes, the DMCA has been (ab)used to prevent competitive development of audio and video players, cable boxes, and even, for a time, printer cartridges. Instead of a free-market rush toward the best technology to meet public demand, we get a trickle of major-label “approved” devices that must be bug-compatible: region-coded DVD players and can’t-record cable boxes.

I don’t agree with Cato on everything, but this report is spot-on. Let’s hope it inspires more in Congress to join Reps. Boucher, Doolittle, and Barton in support of the DMCRA.