Lessig Says Copyright Holders Policies are Limiting Consumer Demand for Broadband
In Tuesday's Washington Post, Stanford University Professor Lawrence Lessig says that the restrictive policies of the publishing, recording, and motion picture industries are limiting consumer demand for broadband services. According to the article:
... {Piracy} is not the most important reason copyright holders have been slow to embrace the net. A bigger reason is the threat the Internet presents to their relatively comfortable ways of doing business.... Online music is the best example of this potential. Five years ago the market saw online music as the next great Internet application. A dozen companies competed to find new and innovative ways to deliver and produce music using the technologies of the Internet....
These experiments in innovation are now over. They have been stopped by lawyers working for the recording industry. Every form of innovation that they disapproved of they sued. And every suit they brought, they won. Innovation outside the control of the "majors" has stopped.
... {Innovation} and growth in broadband have been stifled as courts have given control over the future to the creators of the past. The only architecture for distribution that these creators will allow is one that preserves their power within a highly concentrated market.