2 comments

• 

  PLN

  3 years ago

  I'm also a bit puzzled by his use of the term "market." On the one hand, this passage makes it seem that so long as you have two companies competing at some level with reasonably substitute goods, you have a market, and there's nothing more to be said. In other words, the implication is that there's no noteworthy difference between two companies versus twenty or two hundred, and the fact that we have given legal weapons to content providers that make it two rather than two hundred is of no relevance to its "marketness." It's a binary property.
  
  On the other hand, all of his criticisms of Tim are premised on the idea that there ARE levels of "marketness", and that anything that in any way interferes with content providers maximizing their revenue decreases this "marketness". Because contract is useless against 3rd parties, contract isn't enough ... for the sake of "the market"!
  
  But clearly these two views are incompatible. Even a complete revocation of copyright would still result in -some- production of content, and you would clearly have -some- companies competing to bring this content to customers (just as plenty of for-profit publishers make money on public domain works, despite the existence of libraries and Project Gutenberg). If competition between two government-backed cartels is enough of a market for him, why wouldn't that be?
  
  Baffling.
  
  Actually, it's not really baffling. The explanation, of course, is that the use of "market" is pure rhetoric. The bottom line has to be something what content would actually be produced and delivered to people. And Mr. Ross clearly has rather implausible views along the lines of "without DRM, no digital music would ever reach consumers" ... but misusing the term "market" lets him avoid making clear the absurdity of the causal mechanisms he has in mind.
  reply
• 

  Commons Music

  3 years ago

  "I almost get the feeling that he's arguing, not with me, but with a generic anti-IP left-winger."
  
  
  
  
  I got that same feeling, especially since throughout all the posts he kept referring to you as "the author," rather than by your name.
  
  
  reply