This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 24th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is 10 years old,

but there is not much reason to celebrate, according to Cato Institute

adjunct scholar Tim Lee.

He says one bright spot in the 10-year-old law is that it could have done more damage to creativity

and innovation.

Well, so the DMCA, what it says in effect,

and there's several provisions, but the one that people are most interested, what it's

says in effect and there's several provisions but the one that people are most interested

what it says is that it's illegal to quote-unquote circumvent copy protection.

So for example if you buy music on a lot of online music stores, it'll be wrapped in a special

encrypted format that only certain pieces of software can read. And what the

DMCA says is that third-party vendors can't build hardware or software devices

that can do anything with that.

They can convert it to another format, can play it, etc.

And what that does in effect is it allows companies to sort of lock down content and more importantly it allows

them to control interoperability.

So if I wanted to say build a piece of hardware that interrupted with the iPod.

I wanted to have some sort of Dukebox software.

Before the DMCA, I could have reverse engineered the way the iPod work.

There were lots of examples of people doing the sort of thing

...