Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Business models in the digital age

What To Do When Attacked By Pirates, WSJ: “The labels had granted piracy a half-decade monopoly on awesomeness, and consumers had grown technically adept at illegal downloads—and morally comfortable with them, in the absence of any legal alternative.”

Interesting reading especially in light of other discussions about Amazon and how publishers, like music labels, may have shot themselves in the foot by requiring Amazon to use DRM, allowing one party they didn’t control to become a market leader with huge bargaining power.  The movie companies would like to avoid handing DRM control to an intermediary of that sort, and as we've heard at the DMCA hearings are aggressively trying to do it in-house, but there’s an antitrust problem with creating the one-stop shopping that consumers want.  Or maybe would be if we still had antitrust law.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

So cynical.

When did antitrust go away? Do you have a firm date in mind?

Rebecca Tushnet said...

Hi, unknown! No, I think it's been a slow death. Is there any reason to think my cynicism unjustified?