Bruce Lehman: DMCA hasn’t worked out at all as planned

Michael Geist notes the surprising news that Bruce Lehman, an original architect of what became the DMCA, is basically admitting that the law has been a failure and hasn’t worked out at all as planned. As economist David Levine notes, “You give the big guys more monopoly power and they innovate less. Lehman also doesn’t bother to acknowledge that there were plenty of people who told him very early on that his proposal for the DMCA was incredibly dangerous — and Lehman’s response to those people wasn’t exactly gentlemanly. James Boyle loudly critiqued Lehman’s plans in 1996, and Lehman allegedly threatened to have Boyle denied tenure at the university where he was teaching and (this was the nice one) saying that he would “rip Boyle’s throat out.” Lehman goes on to suggest that we’re entering a “post-copyright era,” which many people agree on. Lehman, however, having lived his entire life focused so much on using copyright law as a lever seems to believe this will mean less music — but there’s very little to indicate that’s the case. It was the record labels themselves that marginalized the musicians, telling them what they could do and how they can do it. These days, the musicians themselves can create the music, make better deals for themselves, and figure out how to embrace these new technologies, without ever having to bother working with the traditional record labels who only know how to squeeze them, not help them.

Source: http://techdirt.com/articles/20070325/163201.shtml