Why not tell the public?

The normally indispensible Declan McCullagh is just plain wrong when equates the move to require the labeling rights-impaired media and electronics wiith the move to require copy impairment be built into media and electronics.

To justify his claim that it’s always wrong to involve the government in a crusade for rights, he trots out experts from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. Apparently the American Enterprise Institute was busy this morning.

I don’t know of labeling is a good idea or not (it seems like a step in the right direction), but Declan’s argument is unconvincing. The beauty of requiring labeling of copy-impaired products is that it imposes no obligation other than telling the truth and give consumers the opportunity to exercise their own judgment about whether to buy them. That sounds like a market-oriented solution to me.

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