Pandora’s antitrust lawsuit against ASCAP is a leading-edge dispute, scheduled for trial by year-end, that may help catalyze a new approach to the old question of whether — and if so to what extent — owners of copyrighted digital content are permitted to refuse to deal with competing distribution channels on dramatically different commercial terms.
The Ninth Circuit confirmed my prediction by tossing one of the private antitrust class actions against Apple, which had challenged the lawfulness of the proprietary DRM technology Apple initially used for downloadable digital music.
Like most legal subjects dealing with technology, copyright law is lagging behind the fast-moving and disruptive changes wrought by social media to old legal rules for determining rights to Internet content. Things may at last be getting a bit more settled.
In the continuing conflict between social media and copyright law, only time will tell. Once again, disruptive technology is caught in the middle.
Tesla is going to have to slog through a long and extremely expensive 50-state battle against archaic dealer-protection laws to implement its business model. Wish them luck.
In the ongoing saga of governmental antitrust investigations of Google, recent weeks have witnessed a new level of rhetoric and disingenuous use of the regulatory process to handicap, rather than promote, competition and innovation. The current case in point relates once again to search neutrality, but this time complaining rivals remarkably object to getting exactly what they’ve asked for over many years.
German, French, Japanese and other nations’ legal rules on search defamation, autocomplete and royalties are foreign, literally, to U.S. jurisprudence.
FairSearch.org is in denial. That is why its proposals should be rejected by antitrust enforcement authorities worldwide. Nothing distills the difference between the European and American approaches to competition law as much as this trend-setting investigation.
The last few weeks have seen a couple of remarkable announcements, one from the FTC about digital advertising disclaimers and one from the SEC about corporate financial disclosures, that just make digital advertising that much harder, if not totally impracticable.
Deconstructing the antitrust analysis applied by the FTC reveals the daunting task it faced in seeking to hold Google accountable for monopolization. The decision to fold-up the agency’s tent represents an admirable instance of prosecutorial restraint by a Commission that had been very publicly hounded by Google’s rivals.
