Is the Music Industry Driving Itself Out of Business?

Ars Technica ran an article yesterday about Pandora, the popular Internet radio service.  The article discussed how royalties being charged by Sound Exchange had risen steeply and were set to double again by 2010.  As a result, Pandora can’t make money and may pull its own plug.  Sound Exchange offered a potential loophole to Internet radio stations by requiring DRM in exchange for lower fees.   They argue that Internet radio can pay these higher fees.

SoundExchange also argues that Internet radio stations could do a lot more to increase their revenue, become profitable, and pay their (arguably high) fees. As much as it pains us to say it, there may be a point here.

I think a bigger issue here is whether the music industry really represents musicians anymore and how disconnected they are from modern paradigms.

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Tags: music industry, online business models, Pandora

Offshoring Schadenfreude

Dictionary.com defines schadenfreude as satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else’s misfortune.  That pretty much describes what I felt today when I read on CNN that an undersea cable break had crippled telecommunications and internet connections in areas of the Middle East and Asia.  Now I love my internet connection so I wasn’t feeling pleasure at the pain of the people overseas that lost their connectivity.  What I was enjoying (and still am) was the frantic handwringing on the part of American companies that had decided to send their jobs overseas to save money. 

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Tags: costs analysis, disaster recovery, economic impacts, offshoring

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Sue ‘Em

This morning Groklaw reported that Barracuda Networks was asking for the assistance of the FOSS community in finding prior art to challenge a patent held by Trend Micro.  It seems that Trend Micro has filed suit against Barracuda claiming that their use of an open source package, ClamAV, violates one of Trend Micro’s patents. 

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Tags: barracuda networks, clamav, Open Source, patent litigation, Software Patents, trend micro