Willam Patry illustrates conservative hypocrisy in "The DMCA: Successful in What?". I don't suggest that liberals have a better grip, only that they're not as hypocritical when protecting special interests.

Conservatives champion free enterprise and the marketplace. laws like the DMCA are contrary to the marketplace and are not conservative in policy. They create artificial rules that protect groups like music and video producers and take away rights from the public and other groups like technology manufacturers. Such laws empower the courts to determine what can and cannot be done, not the marketplace. This is not free enterprise. It is not conservatism.

From Paltry's blog:

On April 26th, the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. hosted a "policy forum" at which the DMCA was the subject of some discussion by House IP chair Lamar Smith and Democratic member Zoe Lofgren. A brief report of the forum may be found here. According to the report, Representative Smith believes the DMCA has been a "successful law," which has been blamed for "everything under the sun." Consumers, he asserts, are becoming comfortable with digital rights management (DRM) technology; if some go too far in the application of DRMs, "the marketplace will act as a discipline on that behavior with consumers voting with their wallets."

Respectfully, I think a fundamental point is being overlooked: the DMCA is legislation, with both civil and criminal penalties; failure to comply with its provisions is not played out in the marketplace, but in the courts, while the threat of things being playing out in the courts has a very significant impact on how things work out in the marketplace, not naturally, but artificially because of the force of the statute