The Ticketmaster-Live Nation antitrust saga has come to a bittersweet end. Earlier this week the Justice Department finally approved the merger between the two firms, just shy of one year after it was announced.
While a number antitrust experts had speculated that the Justice Department might seek an injunction to block the deal outright, the DoJ ultimately opted to approve the deal while subjecting Ticketmaster-Live Nation to several conditions that are supposed to promote competition in the events marketplace. Under the terms of the consent decree, the combined firm will be required to license its ticketing software to competitor Anschutz Entertainment Group and divest Paciolan, a ticketing subsidiary of Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster-Live Nation also faces ten years of monitoring by antitrust officials to “prevent anticompetitive bundling of services.”
Ticketmaster has long been a controversial firm among concertgoers, frequently drawing consumers’ ire for charging hefty “convenience” fees and offering customer service that’s not exactly stellar. But it’s important to remember that today’s entertainment market is more fragmented than ever, and consumers have a huge array of choices for listening to music and viewing live events. Even YouTube is getting into the business of airing live events. The video site has broadcast several live events already, including U2’s Rose Bowl performance in October 2009, and is eyeing the pay-per-view live streaming market as well.
So it’s not hard to see why consolidation is taking place in the event ticketing and promotion markets. Economists have demonstrated that vertical integration, done properly, often results in sizable efficiencies, translating into overall welfare gains for consumers. Together, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are in a stronger position than before to offer value to event venues and promote concerts and shows. And as much we all hate service fees, in industries characterized by high fixed costs and declining marginal unit costs – like ticketing – big per-unit “markups” are often necessary to induce businesses to compete and innovate. While Ticketmaster may not be the most innovative company in the world, the firm faces an uncertain future as its contracts with venues come up for renewal. If Ticketmaster really is harming concertgoers – and by the way, there’s no clear evidence that it is – it will be disciplined not only by concert lovers, but by venues and artists as well. Derailing a potentially efficient business arrangement simply because it might not work out, whether in the event ticketing market or the cable television market, results in harm to consumers.
Today, it was my great privilege to guest lecture at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Under the leadership of Ed Felten, who also runs the excellent “Freedom to Tinker” blog, the CITP has quickly become one of America’s premier institutions in the field of IT policy matters. David Robinson, who some of you will remember from his days as an editor at The American, serves as associate director of the CITP program and was kind enough to invite me to speak. And our own Tim Lee is currently studying there as well. I wish I was smart enough to get into that program!
The topic of my talk was “The Future of the First Amendment in an Age of Technological Convergence” and I used the opportunity to create a narrated video of this presentation, which I have made to several other groups through the years. In this presentation, I talk about “America’s First Amendment Twilight Zone,” which refers to the fact that identical words and images are being regulated in completely different ways today depending on the mode of transmission. This illogical and unfair situation could eventually threaten the Internet, video games, and all new media with many of the misguided regulations that have long been imposed on broadcast television and radio operators. In my presentation, which you can watch below, I make the case for changing our First Amendment regime to ensure “bit equality”; all speech and media platforms should be accorded the gold standard of First Amendment protection.
It’s good to see Google and Microsoft playing nice (for once):
Microsoft has licensed the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to several other mobile communications players, including Apple. Horacio Gutierrez, a top Microsoft intellectual property and licensing executive, said in a statement that Google’s licensing of the patents related to the protocol “is a clear acknowledgement of the innovation taking place at Microsoft.”
He said it also exemplifies the company’s “openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property.”
Last night, I appeared on the Jim Bohannon radio show for 30 minutes and discussed the past, present, and future of the Fairness Doctrine and broadcast industry regulation in general. More specifically, we got into efforts to drive Fairness Doctrine-like regulations back on the books via backdoor efforts like “localism” mandates, community oversight boards, and other public interest requirements. These are issues that Brian Anderson and I discuss in our new book, A Manifesto for Media Freedom, which I blogged about here when it was released in October.
If you’re interested, you can listen to the entire show by clicking here.
“The doggone law. The consarned law. The lousy, frickin’, nit-pickin’, noveau-Prussian, freedom-crushin’ . . . .” Nice to Be Wanted twangs the sad tale:
Like Sensible Khakis and Take Up the Flame,Nice to Be Wanted comes with a license allowing pretty free non-commercial use. Also like those songs, this one requires commercial licensees to tithe 10% to a good cause—here, the Institute for Justice.
We all owe IJ thanks for its Good Works. I owe IJ a special “thank you,” for inspiring the lines in Nice to Be Wanted about the plight of the “charmin’ lady down New Orleans’ way.” Alas, her tale rings all too true. May she—and may we all—win greater freedom to pursue our livelihoods. Go get ‘em IJ! (The bit about “pumped his own gas” also draws from a real-world inspiration: just scroll down to Oregon Revised Statute § 480.330.)
I plan at least a few more of these videos, by the way. Subscribe to my channel to catch them all. My efforts remain pretty raw for now, granted; Nice to Be Wanted comes from only the second take of my first visit to a recording studio. Please share your suggestions about how I might improve. (You can skip, “Suck less,” though. I’m already working on that, thanks.)
Entrepreneurs rock! You wouldn’t guess it, though, to listen to rock music. (Marc Knopfler’s, Boom, Like That,says something about the founding and rise of McDonald’s, granted, but it hardly casts the enterprise in a very flattering light.) So in honor of entrepreneurs everywhere—but especially those in the board sports industries, whom I thank for making some very fun toys—I offer Sensible Khakis:
Like Take Up the Flame, which I coughed up on YouTube last week, Sensible Khakis’license leaves you free to play it just for fun. You can find the chords and lyrics—including the law-geek verse, not included in the video above, about the choices entrepreneurs face between sole proprietorships, corporations, LLPs, and LLCs—here. Like the terms attached to Take Up the Flame, any commercial licensees of Sensible Khakis will have to pay a tithe to one of my favorite causes—this time, Surfrider Foundation. That is not a likely scenario, admittedly, but I figure that the thought counts for something.
At first glance, it seems to me that this big settlement announced today between Google and the book publishers regarding Google Book Search sounds a lot like an ASCAP model for online book transactions. Specifically, of the key provisions of the agreement, it’s this last one about the Book Rights Registry that makes me think of ASCAP:
Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works – Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.
That’s basically what ASCAP does today, and I think this sounds like a pretty good plan for books going forward. But I also find myself wondering: Could this be the beginning of a move toward a more comprehensive online collective licensing system for other types of content as everything moves online. For example, could this model work for music? EFF has argued it could. And some in the music industry appear to be moving in that direction. (Talk about your strange bedfellows… EFF and the RIAA potentially on the same side of an issue!)
Of course, you’d need to get a lot more companies than just Google to play ball to make it work for music — specifically, you’d need all the ISPs on board. For books, by contrast, the reason today’s deal will likely work is because Google has been the only online operator with the scale and interest in putting the entire contents of so many books online. But all music is already online and much video is heading online, too. So, I think it would be much, much more challenging to make collective licensing work for music and video the way it appears it might work for books. (We’d probably need compulsory licensing instead, which I am no fan of). The key to these voluntary collective licensing systems is large, trusted intermediaries that can clear a massive volume of transactions. Google can do that for books as today’s deal makes clear. It will be interesting to see if others suggest that music and video can and should work the same way. I’m skeptical, and I’m also a bit hung up on some fairness issues about how it would work, which I might touch upon in a future essay.
But I’m no copyright expert so I’d be interested in hearing what my colleagues and others think.
Update: Looks like someone beat me to the punch with the ASCAP comparison. I just starting reading through my RSS feed and finding reaction from others and came across Mathew Ingram’s post arguing that, “In effect, Google is setting up a body that does what ASCAP and similar groups do for musicians.”
This week I was pleased to join a diverse collection of think tanks and public interest groups in submitting joint comments to the FCC opposing the proposed content filtering mandate that would be part of a future AWS-3 auction. That’s the proposed auction that would create a “free” nationwide wireless broadband service. As part of the deal, the company would need to need to take steps to provide a “clean” Internet connection by filtering content. This joint filing points out why that is a bad idea:
* the reach of the filtering mandate is extraordinarily broad, and would attempt to censor content far beyond any content regulation regime that has been previously upheld in the face of constitutional challenge.
* even if the scope of the filtering mandate were more narrowly focused, it would conflict with the First Amendment analysis that the Supreme Court applied to Internet access in the seminal Reno v. ACLU decision.
* even if the Commission were to require filtering on an “opt out” or “opt in” basis, the Constitutional problems would not be avoided. Opt-out filtering would impose an unconstitutional burden on listeners and recipients of Internet communications, and both opt-out and opt-in filtering would violate the First Amendment rights of speakers and other content providers on the Internet. Simply put, the First Amendment does not allow a government mandated “blacklist” of websites to be blocked.
* would also violate the terms and intent of two federal statutes – 47 U.S.C. § 326 (which prohibits the Commission from “interfer[ing] with the right of free speech”) and 47 U.S.C. § 230 (which promotes user control over content and limits burdens on service providers).
* would also limit what people could do online using the free AWS-3 service so dramatically that the usefulness of the service would be radically reduced.
* would also certainly lead to legal challenges that would delay the implementation of the proposed access service. Continue reading →
In the United States, the FBI tracks annual statistics on police officer slayings as well as assaults on police officers. I compared these figures to the various release dates for the three major GTA console game releases to date (GTA III, GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas) and plotted the whole thing on the chart below. It’s a bit like the well-known video games vis-a-vis juvenile crime graph created by Duke Ferris of GameRevolution a few years back, although with a much narrower focus.The FBI statistics portray a much different picture than that painted by critics like Thompson and Grossman.
In the chart, I’ve plotted FBI figures for police officers feloniously killed (blue line) and police officers assaulted (red line, listed in thousands). As can be seen, police officer murders peaked at 70 in 1997 (i.e., four years before GTA III) and again in 2001. GTA III was released in late October that year, so if the game caused that year’s spike, it would have had only two months in which to do so. (also, the 2001 figures don’t count the 72 officers lost when the World Trade Centers collapsed).
The chart shows that since GTA III was released police killings have been trending downward to a low of 48 in 2006. Although the FBI has not yet posted 2007 numbers, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund lists 68 police officers as having been shot to death in 2007. But it’s worth pointing out that while there may have been a spike in police slayings last year, there was no corresponding GTA release. There hasn’t been a new Grand Theft Auto console title issued since San Andreas in October, 2004.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
Comments 
Posted in: Advertising & Marketing, Antitrust & Competition Policy 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
