Hollywood Like Old Soviet Empire
TechDirt sounds off on Hollywood’s ongoing inability to create a customer-friendly distribution system:
“And the reasons they’ve flopped are frankly pretty obvious: high prices, restrictive DRM, and no easy way to move videos to the device of your choice. I won’t re-hash those arguments, but I think it’s interesting to compare the anemic development of the digital video marketplace with the rapid development of digital audio a decade ago.”
This is more of the “canary in the coal mine” argument that I’ve mentioned. I like the additional comparison they pull out of an excellent paper by Tim Wu, Columbia law professor:
“Wu’s basic insight is that too much centralization of control over any one part of the economy can lead to poor decision-making. In an extreme case, such as Soviet Russia, a government can try to run a whole economy by central planning. But the same principle applies on smaller scales.”
Well, we all know what happened to the USSR…
March 9, 2008 4:07 pm 
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