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

[Kevin Carson]

This strikes me as relevant to recent discussions with Ryan.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com>
Date: Feb 1, 2010 11:10 PM
Subject: [p2p-research] The iTunes Store: just a detour on the way to a
world without intellectual p...
To: Peer-To-Peer Research List <p2presearch at listcultures.org>



Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader:


The iTunes Store: just a detour on the way to a world without intellectual
property<http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/rationalitate/%7E3/SqPytzV3Iqo/itunes-store-just-detour-on-way-to.html>
via Anarchoblogs <http://anarchoblogs.org/> by Raționalitate on 2/1/10

Tim Lee has an interesting analysis <http://timothyblee.com/?p=2169> 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.
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-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
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