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And, of course, if all that isn’t enough and a new player is somehow able to enter their kill zone, these behemoths know exactly what to do. Venture capitalists know that too, making them cautious about where they invest, and thus making it even more difficult for nascent competitors to get a toeho…

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…