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DOJ Drops Online Music Antitrust Investigation
JOstrow writes "On Tuesday, the Justice Department ended a two year long antitrust investigation into the online ventures of the music industry. The assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, R. Hewitt Pate, was quoted, 'Consumers now have available to them an increasing variety of authorized outlets from which they can purchase digital music and consumers are using those services in growing numbers.' What took off a lot of the heat was pressplay (now Napster!) and MusicNet changing their services to allow songs to be transferred from machine to machine."
The Irritating thing is that large businesses can get away with anticompetitive behavior and then, at the last minute get off scott free. why don't the file sharing or P2P crowd have the same Deal?
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Why the hell is a ruling on antitrust action being made based on the current market, not when the action was first filed? This is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. If I get arrested for a crime, which is later repealed, I'm still under arrest and guilty of the crime.
When this case was filed, RIAA et al were suing anyone who had anything to do with online music distribution...at one point Napster was arguing that the lawsuits were less about copyright violations and more about forcing consumers to use RIAA's own crappy services.
Now two years later, because everyone had no choice but to go along with the insane pricing and restrictions RIAA wanted to begin with, we suddenly have plenty of options and competition? Bull! We consumers have already been harmed. the lion's share of online music cost is RIAA royalties. We now have to choose between the Microsoft/WMA world or the Apple/AAC world, with no way to move purchases from one to the other. This is exactly what RIAA wanted all along, and by forcing early adopters to choke to death on the crappy v1 PressPlay and MusicNet, everyone else thinks iTunes Music Store and Wal-Mart are wonderful.
F that. Yet another case of our Republican administration yanking the leash back to reward their favorite corporate donors.
The only thing about this whole mess that is true is that P2P applications are so far staying well ahead of the piracy police...so, yes, I guess it is true that consumers have plenty of choices and options...Kazaa, eDonkey/Overnet, iMesh, BitTorrent.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
From an antitrust perspective, this is right. The labels blew it so badly in online music distribution that they failed to achieve significant market share. They tried, but failed through sheer incompetence.
But it's not like successful anti-trust lawsuits ever punish infringing companies enough. For example, Microsoft has been found to be an illegal monopoly time after time. But no serious punishment or solution, such as splitting up the company, has even been considered. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to unfairly exploit it's desktop monopoly and crush any competition.
The real target of anti-trust investigations should be all the large record companies. They get together, form the RIAA, and control the market. If this isn't a target for anti-trust action, I don't know what is.
there are still only less than 5 (how many are there now after the recent buyouts?) companies that own the vast vast majority of music copyrights and all sell their music for the smae prices?
what part of anti-competitive collusionary tactics between a handful of companies to Standard Oil themselves in charge of a whiole industry am i missing that made the DOJ drop it?
face it - the DOJ is useless to stop subtle and patently obvious monopolies. So be it.
We are bigger than they are... we're crushing them with Linux, and we can crush them by not buying CDs any more.
no problem. We are in charge.. they can't sue all of us.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
The real punishment for their evils is one worse than any gov. agency could give. In a world where name recognition is all important, the refusal to sell music online at first made illegal PSP programs have the biggest name in online music. Now if the common man wants digital music he thinks of kazaa long before pressplay. Reclaiming the Napster name helped them a little, but their was too much time between the Napster of old and its new corporate foil. They are dieing for not growing when they had the chance. The DOJ might have realized that and felt bad enough for them to call off the dogs.
Open Source Sushi
See you in court five years from now.
I love Republican idiology. Women who willingly, even enthusiastically give the president blow jobs should be part of the public record, because the people have the right to know, but powerful industrial representatives who meet with the administration in secret should have both the meetings, the attendees, and the topics and effects of those meetings should all be kept secret, because that would interfer with the ability to the government to conduct the people's business without puclic scrutiny.
If there is one thing this administration doesn't deserve, it's the benefit of any doubt.
'Consumers now have available to them an increasing variety of authorized outlets from which they can purchase digital music and consumers are using those services in growing numbers.'
Unfortunately (as was hinted at in another comment), The Big 5, acting as one, still control the material; yes, we have more middlemen ('outlets') to sell it to John Q. Public, but the middlemen have no choice in supply. Hence, 'consumers' (the term the DOJ used) still don't have any true choice.
If one manufacturer had a monopoly on car batteries, yet I can buy said batteries from Target, Wal-Mart, Ace Hardware, and a few other stores, do I really have a choice? Is there any significant change to the monopoly status?
I think the DOJ is wearing the wrong kind of glasses, metaphorically speaking.
RD
Don't know why I'm responding to an AC but this stuff is not too badly written and fairly juicy.
I think the selectivity of the use of the independent prosecutor law and who chooses to use it is a moral gray area. In retrospect, it is easy to say, 'Clinton should have come clean,' and suffered the embarrasment that apparently terrified him more than lying under oath.
However, that Clinton underwent an investigation because of his extending a law providing for independent prosecutors and then suffered because of it is not 'justice,' at best, someone half-clever might would call it 'irony,' while someone who'd read three books might throw in some French and call it, 'being hoist by one's own petard.'
Considering the nature and intensity of the investigation, with its expansion into any and all areas at a cost to the taxpayer in the tens of millions, it's very surprising to see that all the investigation turned up can be summed up by saying, a. 'While in office, President Clinton possessed a male libido' and b. President Clinton acted on its urgings.
You could say, in fact, that the investigation was the last bastion of ultimate lameness, because actual 'investigation,' had nothing to do with its success: as the O.C. himself pointed out, only someone's ratting out Clinton to the I.C. led to the discovery of the pecadillo and subsequent perjury.
When you talk about the independent prosecutor law being something the Republican party wanted to do away with, you have to take into account what the law was meant for and what it reacted to. In the right hands it can be used as a tool to root out real, genuine crimes against the people of this country and the democratic process like, uh, well, Watergate.
While in the wrong hands--in malicious hands--it spends forty million plus to uncover the fact that the Leader of the Free World can get it up in a closet and it needed a lucky break to do it.
Please have your priorities examined at the door.
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