[p2p-research] The iTunes Store: just a detour on the way to a world without intellectual p...

[Kevin Carson]

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: The iTunes Store: just
a detour on the way to a world without intellectual property via
Anarchoblogs by Raționalitate on 2/1/10

Tim Lee has an interesting analysis of the shortcomings of Apple's
iPad, but at the end he makes what I believe is a very prescient, more
general point about the future of intellectual property and digital
media:

This is of a piece with the rest of Apple’s media strategy. Apple seems
determined to replicate the 20th century business model of paying for
copies of content in an age where those copies have a marginal cost of
zero. Analysts often point to the strategy as a success, but I think
this is a misreading of the last decade. The parts of the iTunes store
that have had the most success—music and apps—are tied to devices that
are strong products in their own right. Recall that the iPod was
introduced 18 months before the iTunes Store, and that the iPhone had
no app store for its first year. In contrast, the Apple TV, which is
basically limited to only playing content purchased from the iTunes
Store, has been a conspicuous failure. People don’t buy iPods and
iPhones in order to use the iTunes store. They buy from the iTunes
store because it’s an easy way to get stuff onto their iPods and
iPhones.

Apple is fighting against powerful and fundamental economic forces. In
the short term, Apple’s technological and industrial design prowess can
help to prop up dying business models. But before too long, the force
of economic gravity will push the price of content down to its marginal
cost of zero. And when it does, the walls of Apple’s garden will feel a
lot more confining. If “tablets” are the future, which is far from
clear, I’d rather wait for a device that gives me full freedom to run
the applications and display the content of my choice.

Even though Apple's managed to stave off some amount of piracy with the
iTunes Store, I think this is likely to be temporary as it becomes
easier and easier to pirate media. (Streaming music – legally through
YouTube and MySpace pages – and movies – through illegal content hosted
on sites like megavideo.com – have already been essentially freed, and
as soon as the internets' pipes become thick enough that you can
download quickly without resorting to BitTorrent, I think it's over for
online movie/TV sales.)

This same analysis could be applied to the Wall Street Journal – it has
a niche now, but it may not in the future, and I doubt any company
(including the New York Times) will be able to emulate its online
strategy.

My advice to content providers in it for the long haul would be: make
it all free, find a good behavioral advertising firm, team up with a
company like Facebook or Amazon which already has a lot of mineable
data stored in already-established profiles, and, most importantly,
hire a damn good lawyer, lobbyist, and PR firm. A Message From
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