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Earlier this month French protesters took to the streets,

marched to a police station, and turned themselves in for committing a crime,

playing songs purchased on iTunes on devices not named

iPods. While these music enthusiasts certainly displayed a flare for the

dramatic, their public confession Timothy Lee, editor at the Show Me Institute and author of the Cato Studies Circumventing Competition,

the perverse consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, offers his comments today.

Why are music enthusiasts in France turning themselves into the police?

Well the protest is about a technology called digital rights management.

If you buy, say, a song from the iTunes music store and you download it from the internet and you can play it on your computer with iTunes

or you can transfer it to your iPod.

But there's no easy way for you to transfer that song to say a Dell or

Sony MP free player or to play it on other software like any sort of

Windows Media Player software for example. And the reason is that this

technology called Digital Rights Management software which is theoretically supposed to be an antipy

measure, but it has this unintended consequence that it creates a lot of interoperability

problems between different devices.

And it's not just music, you have the same problem with, for example,

DVDs. There's no legal way to transfer a movie from a DVD on to, say, your iPod to watch on the

road because this digital rights management software has scrambled the DVD and

...