Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons Faculty Publications 2009 Rethinking Anticircumvention's Interoperability Policy Aaron K. Perzanowski Case Western University School of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/faculty_publications Part of the Intellectual Property Law Commons Repository Citation Perzanowski, Aaron K., "Rethinking Anticircumvention's Interoperability Policy" (2009). Faculty Publications. 44. https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/faculty_publications/44 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons. Rethinking Anticircumvention’s Interoperability Policy Aaron K. Perzanowski* Interoperability is widely touted for its ability to spur incremental innovation, increase competition and consumer choice, and decrease barriers to accessibility. In light of these attributes, intellectual property law generally permits follow-on innovators to create products that interoperate with existing systems, even without permission. The anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) represent a troubling departure from this policy, resulting in patent-like rights to exclude technologies that interoperate with protected platforms. Although the DMCA contains internal safeguards to preserve interoperability, judicial misinterpretation and narrow statutory text render those safeguards largely ineffective. One approach to counteracting the DMCA’s restrictions on interoperability is to rely on antitrust scrutiny and the resulting mandatory disclosure of technical information. However, both doctrinal and policy considerations suggest that antitrust offers a less than ideal means of lessening the DMCA’s impact on interoperability.