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Figuring out how to get your program played on a phone without paying a toll to the phone maker isn’t a copyright violation, but it is a business-model violation. Congress could easily have written section 1201 of the DMCA to say, “Bypassing DRM to violate copyright is illegal,” but it didn’t. It c…

Despite everything the publishers attempted to drive up the price of ebooks, then, Amazon still succeeded in driving them down. That’s good news for price-sensitive readers, and undoubtedly helps democratize reading and access to books. And it’s terrific for authors who can find an audience on the …

The key to achieving this is anticircumvention rules, which were first mandated in 1996 via a pair of international copyright treaties.15 Developed in response to fears from rights holders that the easy copying and distribution facilitated by the internet might destroy their business models, the tr…

[...] Platforms are often distinguished from traditional “pipeline” businesses, which have producers at one end and consumers at the other. But these create chokepoints too: as when record labels and music publishers accrue vast reservoirs of copyrights and use them to extract maximum value for the…

We agree there is an urgent need to reform antitrust law and enforcement and certainly criticize existing approaches in the pages that follow. But antitrust should not be relied upon to do all the heavy lifting. In this book, we explore how the chokepoints enabling corporations to extract more than…