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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."
Actually, it isn't a "crock of crap".
The thrust of an anti-trust action is that it has or will harm consumers. If you get down the road and it can be demonstrated that consumers aren't harmed, then there is little need to seek a remedy.
Remember that unlike theft - the grounds on which Napster, et al have been pursued - anti-trust is a civil, not crimanl action.
The goal of our anti-trust laws are to insure that consumers are not harmed by anti-competitive behavior on the part of businesses. If there is no harm, then there is no foul.
As a civil action, the goal of anti-trust enforcement is to seek a remedy that will generate competition and will protect consumers from anti-competitive behavior.
In this case, the DOJ is simply saying, "At this point in time there is no evidence of lack of choice or anti-competitive behavior (though that might not have been the case when we started). Therefore, there is no need for a remedy at this point in time.
To be clear, the DOJ isn't saying that they didn't attempt to engage in anti-competitive behavior, rather, that there is no evidence that consumers have been or are being harmed. Remember, "No harm, no foul!"
A few years ago, this anti-trust investigation was a favorite retort of music-piracy advocates when confronted with the inherent illegality of their online music copying. "Look," they would say, "the music industry is a monopoly. Therefore we have a moral right to steal their products." Never mind the absurdity of the argument, that somehow some breech of regulation by a business made stealing their property legal, it became a very popular argument among the morally and intellectually bankrupt hypocrites who claimed to hate intellectual property but just couldn't get enough copyrighted popular music.
Now, with several years of tough enforcement of copyright laws, aimed both at prosecuting individual users and shutting down the front operations running illegal piracy services, the truth has been shown. With piracy pushed back into the margins of legal disrepute, the market has changed so that a plethora of successful and popular music download services have operated. Using protected files and charging fair prices, they are changing the way people buy music. The argument made by the recording industry, that piracy was the biggest obstacle to legal online music distribution, has been proven completely correct, and the completely backward notion put forward by piracy advocates, that piracy services flourished only because the music "cartel" was not offering any reasonable alternatives, shown to be completely ridiculous. Now the government has wisely withdrawn its antitrust investigation, which in retrospect was a misguided attempt at market regulation that should never have been made in the first place, as the self-regulating nature of free market economies has once again been shown to all who would doubt it. The only thing markets need to succeed is the rule of law and respect for property rights, and now that those rights are secure we can only guess at the innovation which the future will bring.
Does anybody know if iTunes (or any of these other stores) now allow the official resale of songs to other parties? There was a story on slashdot a few months back about somebody trying this on eBay and getting stopped by the eBay TOS. Has this changed now?
Additionaly, am I right that as soon as Apple, Pressplay or any other venture goes bankrupt and I format my hd and reinstall the songs from a backup, I'm out of luck and can't play them ever again?
Thanks for any clarifications!
There are two aspects to it - one is becoming a monopoly itself (which isn't illegal by itself, as long as it happens in a legal way), and abusing said monopoly. The problem from a legal point of view is that it is very difficult to give a clear definition of when exactly it is abusing the power. Yes, it might seem "obvious" to you that this is an abuse of market power, but it's hardly specified anywhere in a law that "under market conditions X, with a market power Y, it is illegal to do Z".
After all, there's no doubt that Microsoft, RIAA has a lot of power, in whatever they do, simply because they're monopolies (no, that does not mean 100% market share. Look it up). The question is, where exactly is the border between use and abuse? It's a fundamental right, for companies as well as individuals to know what is illegal. Not "we'll decide that this is illegal" after the fact.
Since it's mostly a gray area decided on a case-by-case basis, they do not want it to be self-limiting out of fear. That's why most penalties are designed to be corrective rather than punitative, or in more normal terms, their goal is to end the reason for the anti-trust suit, nothing more. Think of it an anti-trust ruling almost like a specific instantiation of the law "It is illegal for a company with Microsoft's market power, under the current market conditions, to integrate IE the way they do." After that it is "law", and you can punish them bigtime if they don't comply with that.
The thing is, when conditions change, the "law" goes null and void. Which leads to cases like this, where they basicly say: "Well, the market conditions are no longer the same as at the time of the filing, so even if we went ahead the ruling would have no effect whatsoever."
If you want an analogy, a dog on a leash gets reined in when it goes too far (corrective), it doesn't get a beating because it went too far (punitative). If you did, it would probably stick very close to you, afraid of getting a beating (self-limiting).
The whole problem occurs when the legal system is lagging. The leash is an instant feedback "this is the limit". This investigation is like saying "Well, the dog tore the leash, but ran out of the city (where it's supposed to be on a leash) and into the woods, where it usually runs free anyway. So everything is ok, no need to leash it now." The result is the dog can keep running (drag it out in court) until the problem solves itself and nothing happens.
It sucks, and there really should be punitative penalities for what I mean are blatant and obvious abuses of power. We don't have to list all the possible ways to kill a man in the murder paragraph, then we shouldn't have to list all the ways to stifle competition in the anti-trust paragraph either.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I love Republican idiology. Women who willingly, even enthusiastically give the president blow jobs should be part of the public record
Sorry, this was Democratic ideology. George H. W. Bush vetoed the "Violence Against Women Act", which made a defendant's sexual conduct admissible in sexual harassment cases. Bill Clinton is the one who turned around and signed it into law. Paula Jones's lawyers were only able to even ask Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to testify about their relationship because of a law the Republicans tried to block and which Bill Clinton personally enacted.
Furthermore, it only became a big deal because of Clinon's perjury combined with Linda Tripp's tip to the independent counsel. And the only reason an independent counsel existed is because the Democratic Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed the reauthorization of the independent counsel statute.
To quote Bill Clinton in 1994, when he signed the reauthorization: "Opponents called it a tool of partisan attack against Republican Presidents and a waste of taxpayer funds. It was neither. In fact, the independent counsel statute has been in the past and is today a force for Government integrity and public confidence." Let's just say that my sympathy was rather low when he turned around and denounced the office he reinstated as a tool of partisan attack against himself and a waste of funds.
So Bill Clinton was caught up by the consequences of his own decisions. He is the one who made his testimony compellable, while Republican policies would have kept the issue out of the public record. He is the one who then committed perjury to try to escape the consequences of his bad policy decision. And he is the one who, despite being warned by the Republicans that it was a partisan attack tool and a waste of money, re-created the office of the Independent Counsel.
If the Republicans had been given their way in the beginning, we'd have never heard of Monica Lewinsky, and Ken Starr would have never been apointed. Bill Clinton was only a victim of himself.
Are you aware that for the last several decades all (US) copyright laws have been written by the publishing industry and passed by congress essentially unrevised? Copyright law has gone far astray from its original function and purpose.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Eh, the investigation was concerned with whether or not the future of online digital music distribution was going to be controlled by the five major labels, which have significant equity stakes in pressplay and MusicNet.
The Justice Dept. was concerned that the five majors would end up with exclusive control of online digital distribution, which would be a Bad Thing and would probably violate antitrust.
Since Apple is kicking ass in this space, and there's a bunch of other players out there that don't have anything to do with the majors, that's not a concern anymore, which is why Justice is dropping the investigation.
In a democracy the people rule, but "the people" doesn't mean that we've got a small army running around trying to force everyone to take part of the democratic process regarding things they don't even care about.
That has resulted in us today having people that complain about others having what they think is too much power; but most people complaining don't even try to do anything about it.
Maybe it today isn't what it originally was intended to be, but personally I don't know what it really should be. On one hand copyright is about making sure people dare to release their work without it being stolen by just about anyone, but more importantly copyright is about limiting the control of what you have created... making sure that you lose control of your own work, to the benefit of the people.
I just don't know what can be considered fair when it comes to taking away what a person owns...
I do know one thing though, no one intended copyright to allow the public to get free access the newest (sometimes not even released) movies, music etc; so there's no doubt it being wrong that people using P2P/filesharing to share the work that they authors, creators etc haven't even started making any money from.
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