Music in electronic markets: an empirical study

Music plays an important, and sometimes overlooked part in the transformation of communication and distribution channels. With a global market volume exceeding US$40 billion, music is not only one of the primary entertainment goods in its own right. Since music is easily personalized and transmitted, it also permeates many other services across cultural borders, anticipating social and economic trends. This article presents one of the first detailed empirical studies on the impact of internet technologies on a specific industry. Drawing on more than 100 interviews conducted between 1996 and 2000 with multinational and independent music companies in 10 markets, strategies of the major players, current business models, future scenarios and regulatory responses to the online distribution of music files are identified and evaluated. The data suggest that changes in the music industry will indeed be far-reaching, but disintermediation is not the likely outcome

RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems: The Recording Industry Attempts to Slow the MP3 Revolution, Taking Aim at the Jogger Friendly Diamond Rio

The music industry may never be the same again. In recent years, the recording industry has faced an onslaught of advances resulting from digital technology. The record industry has battled the manufacturing and import industries over digital home recording since the 1980\u27s. Digital technology initially manifested itself with the compact disc ( CD ) and the digital audio tape ( DAT ) in the early 1980\u27s and generated greater tensions between the recording, electronics, and computer industries

Protecting U.S. Intellectual Property Rights and the Challenges of Digital Piracy

According to U.S. industry and government officials, intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement has reached critical levels in the United States as well as abroad. The speed and ease with which the duplication of products protected by IPR can occur has created an urgent need for industries and governments alike to address the protection of IPR in order to keep markets open to trade in the affected goods. Copyrighted products such as software, movies, music and video recordings, and other media products have been particularly affected by inadequate IPR protection. New tools, such as writable compact discs (CDs) and, of course, the Internet have made duplication not only effortless and low-cost, but anonymous as well. This paper discusses the merits of IPR protection and its importance to the U.S. economy. It then provides background on various technical, legal, and trade policy methods that have been employed to control the infringement of IPR domestically and internationally. This is followed by an analysis of current and future challenges facing U.S. industry with regard to IPR protection, particularly the challenges presented by the Internet and digital piracy.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

The DMCA and Researchers' First Amendment Rights

 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, was enacted by Congress in October of 1998.1 Section 1201(a)(1) of the Act, known as the "anti-circumvention" provision, states that "[n]o person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [digital] work protected under this title.".2 Sections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b) combine to form the "anti-trafficking" provisions, which provide that no one shall distribute technology that can accomplish this circumvention.3 Congress constructed a two-year delay in implementation of these provisions, thus, on October 28, 2000, circumvention of effective technological controls became punishable by both civil and criminal actions.4 Unfortunately, the presence of these provisions, along with courts refusal to recognize traditional copyright privileges and defenses in this area of "paracopyright,"5 chills programmers' speech

Development for the Past, Present, and Future: Defining and Measuring Sustainable Development

In 1987, the United Nations released the Brundtland Report, which defined sustainable development as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While this definition provides a relatively stable theoretical base from which development economists and political scientists can begin to tackle issues surrounding sustainable development, the inherently amorphous nature of this definition has also created a fair amount of ambiguity in both the economic literature surrounding sustainable development and the subsequent attempts by economists to measure it. Historically, those interested in the science of development have typically relied on very specific and fundamental indicators and measurement tools (GDP, HDI, etc.) in their attempts to define and understand development trends around the world. In response to emerging interest in the relatively new idea of “sustainable development,” a number of economists and political scientists have attempted to define and measure the popular term. However, due to the vague nature of the term itself and the multitude of opinions concerning its true meaning, the current economic literature concerning sustainable development is exceptionally hazy, lacking any real consensus on the exact definition of the term and more importantly: how best to measure it. This project rectifies this gap in economic and political understanding surrounding sustainable development. The project funnels a fairly exhaustive review of contemporary literature on the topic into a comprehensive, polished definition of sustainable development. Based on this new definition, and with solid footholds in development theory, the project then creates a composite statistic that can be used to measure sustainable development on a national scale, in a generalizable and cross national context. The resulting index, the SDMI (Sustainable Development Measurement Index), integrates economic, social, and environmental components in its assessment of the sustainability of development in each nation where it is applied. Lastly, through the juxtaposition of the SDMI with classic developmental measurement techniques like GDP and the Human Development index (displayed through the utilization of in-depth, intricate maps), this project illuminates an array of contemporarily relevant issues in the fields of economics and political science