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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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Yet another case of our Republican administration yanking the leash back to reward their favorite corporate donors.
Proof? This investigation began during the same administration, so unless I see some actual coorelation between donation and administrative action, I call BS on you.
Actually, your analogy is slightly flawed.
It's like getting arrested for a crime, but getting released without punishment because, hey, you're not doing it right now.
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
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.
'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