As the article mentions, DAT was mandated to be deliberately limited in its use by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act -- the first MP3 players were sued under the definition in the law, and barely escaped being banned. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_.... )

The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like this were really the worst form of regulation -- they both limited innovation, and didn't really work for the kind of market/business model protection that their advocates desired. I think we'll probably re-learn this after a long period of lax (or relaxed, depending on how you view it) regulation of tech.