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- It's clear that you need to brush up on the facts before commenting. No, Level3 is not an ILEC. Qwest is, of course. And, no, Internet access is not at all like POTS. We are, most emphatically,...
- I totally agree with you that we all need to put down our pens (or rather our keyboards for this matter), and understand that we are doing great harm to those journalists, institutions, or other...
- Your issue as I understand it is with Level 3 - are they an ILEC? Isn't Qwest (or a local coop) the ILEC there in Laramie? Two - you provide services a lot like a local exchange - I would guess...
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- <i>I'd buy a newspaper that reported substance over he said/she said stenography mixed with tabloid fluff.</i> You might, but I think most of the evidence suggests that not very...
2 years ago
Thus to say that IP is important to small companies doing business with larger ones makes sense for industries with risky and expensive R&D;, especially where development and commercialization/manufacturing can be modularized. In such cases, small firms need IP to license to gain access to the capabilities and resources of larger companies.
The economic structure of capital and risk intensive innovation is what Jim Delong writes about in his summer article. Such lessons apply less to ecommerce companies that leverage distributional and informal input mechanisms with almost zero development costs, and little inbound licensing.
It would not be quite right to generalize YouTube as an economic lesson for the non-importance of IP as much as an example of a company on one side of the spectrum where IP is less valuable. Thus painting YouTube as a universal form of innovation without IP is not right or wrong, but incomplete.
Another reason not to prop up YouTube too much is that it has mediocre profit if any, and only recently signed deals with content owners. Until now, YouTube has been an invention, with acquisition by Google YouTube can become an innovation with great market or technological impact. It's the strategic future market that drove Google's paying price past $1B. The majority of the price tag, however, probably comes from YouTube's user base and name recognition. We should also consider what Google knows based on talks with YouTube that the rest of us do not- perhaps some resolution of copyright issues.
2 years ago