DeCSS, crypto, law, and economics

[Bill Stewart]

At 08:45 AM 01/08/2003 -0800, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>Maybe. Not necessarily if that meant that no new movies ever got
>made. Now, the UK isn't a big enough market for this, but consider
>what would happen if the US said "listen, free drugs would be great
>for consumers so let's get rid of all drug patents". This would
>probably dramatically increase social welfare at the moment, since
>there are quite a few people who would buy drugs if they were
>cheaper. (It's of course not Pareto dominant). However, it seems
>likely that this would have such a negative effect on future
>production that it would lower social welfare in the future.

In the case of medicinal drugs (as opposed to recreational),
the legal barriers to development and sale of new drugs
have raised the cost to about $500-800 million,
as well as adding a significant delay to availability dates,
and there are fairly convincing arguments that those have
at least as large a negative effect.  It certainly focuses
drug development in directions that can sustain big-hit
marketing campaigns, plus a small amount that's covered by
orphan-disease-drug loopholes.

It's fairly well-known that far more people died from
regulation-caused delays in deployment of several heart-attack drugs
than from active damage by failures such as misuse of thalidomide,
though some people still believe that we're better off because
the regulators also prevented wide deployment of
SideEffectOMycin and DidntWorkATol.

But back to the DVD issue - it's not an issue of public safety;
this stuff is just television.  While I'm not particularly convinced that
copyright and patent legislation actually accomplishes the goals of
advancing science and the arts, or that the time periods that those
protections give exactly count as "limited", it's certainly important
to have "Fair Use" protections for what the public can do with the
information.  On the other hand, legislating against DRM because
it prevents the public from exercising fair use seems wrong
(especially because I prefer technical means of protection for
that kind of material than legal protections),
though legislation that bans public attempts to work around DRM
also seems wrong as well, and failing to ban it just means that
people who want to build DRM systems will just have to do a better job of it.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com