Games, Nasty Games
Scott has found a lot of nifty diversions lately. Devil Balls is particularly cruel.
Daily Archives: March 3, 2004
The Music Industry Might be Wise to Get Rid of the RIAA
John Dvorak makes this interesting argument:
Copy protection schemes, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and lawsuits against file sharers are not going to save the music business. In fact, the opposite is true. I’m convinced that the shuttering of the original wide-open Napster almost four years ago was the beginning of the end for the recording industry. This is because Napster was not just an alternative distribution network; it was an alternative sampling system.
Dvorak is right about the aborted potential of Napster to power growth in the music industry but it was never going to survive in its old form with or without Napster like sampling capability.
I can’t predict exactly how it will transform as such things take on a lives of their own but I do expect to see massive disintermediation despite the best effort of the faltering industry dinosaurs.
Napster was the tip of the meteor so to speak. The RIAA, Warner, Sony, etc., congress, the FCC all need to just get out of the way because we will have our music and we will have it at the price and in the form that we find useful and enjoyable.
A Lawyer is a Lawyer is a Lawyer
Right?
Well, no, not exactly. We all read about trial lawyers, district attorneys, attorney generals, defense lawyers, etc., and perhaps think we know all about lawyers. Most of us don’t visit lawyers often if at all. We tend not to use them for our marriages, our real estate purchases, etc. Really, why would we want to waste money on a lawyer. Sometimes we are right. Other times we are wrong.
So what other kinds of lawyers are there besides the ‘glamorous’ ones listed above. There are the transactional lawyers. The what? Well, I scratched my head over that for a long time and finally got my head wrapped around it a year or so ago when I realized that I had worked with many transactional lawyers and just hadn’t correctly applied the label. They all did this:
…write contracts that protect our clients when things go wrong.
Scheherazade writes a lot more about what it means to be a transactional lawyer and you should go read it all. I particularly enjoyed this part:
The part that’s not fun is the chronic suspicion you have of everyone else, and what turns into a constant tug-of-war between trying to draft the contract so your own client has free rein to be as big of a son-of-a-bitch as he/she/it wants while the other side gets hamstrung if they stop being sweetness and light. I can see why businesspeople don’t want to cultivate that particular sharp imaginative ability, and outsource it instead to us.
Via Professor Bainbridge who adds to Margaret’s discussion:
Perhaps my main disagreement with her comments is that they doesn’t sufficiently stress the role of regulatory arbitrage – figuring out how to structure a deal so that the size of the pie expands for everybody (her analysis focuses mainly on pie division). In addition, good transactional lawyers also devote attention to the question of thinking about how the contract incentivizes good behavior on the part of both their client and the other side.
Transactional lawyers will be an important part of any future free society (read unencumbered by inefficient and oppressive gov’t regulations).