More disruption to the business model of television.  Check out this quote:

“Meanwhile, the paid TV industry has been reeling from the impact of subscribers defecting in favor of piecing together their own viewing options with streaming services and devices like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Roku.  Last year alone, an estimated 687,000 cable subscribers canceled their accounts, according to Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson, the eponymous Wall Street veterans at MoffettNathanson research firm in Manhattan.  All of 2013, they said in a report last year, amounted to the worst 12-month stretch in the paid television industry they had ever seen.”

http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2014/04/comcast_launches_streaming_dvr_service_in_nj.html

… according to a Forbes article from 2013:

http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2013/disruptors/index.html

… and by ‘here’ we mean Canada.”

Great article about what’s at stake for the cable companies if the public pushes for unbundling cable channels.

http://consumerist.com/2013/10/15/a-la-carte-cable-is-here-and-by-here-we-mean-canada/

… and this article features a quote from our own Professor Mark McKenna!

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/another-case-between-apple-samsung-heads-court

Everyone’s going to be watching this case — further to my point that the Supreme Court has been wading into patent law with increasing frequency; a trend I find interesting.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/31/us-usa-court-ip-idUSBREA2U05X20140331

I stumbled across this really great website when I was reading about the legal battles Uber is facing right now! I suggest reading this article: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3028547/investors-say-lawbreakers-like-airbnb-aereo-and-uber-are-increasingly-worth-the-legal-bills

It highlights several of the themes we’ve discussed in this class so far: disruptive innovation; the tension between lawyers and entrepreneurs; the Napster lawsuit, etc. It’s really a great article now that we’re 9+ weeks into the class

A nice follow-up article to today’s class and our end thought on how law and innovation intersect.

http://www.multichannel.com/blogs/mcn-guest-blog/legislators-say-law-revamp-key-tech-innovation

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303546204579435473953788430

This is a really interesting article about how entrepreneurs are looking over the farm bill to find innovative ways to make money and start business. One of the cooler ideas is one to sell fresh produce online to people who receive food stamps.

This article summarizes the holdings of the Grokster, Sony, and Napster cases, and discusses how the court differentiated the cases in order to reach a conclusion.  The Supreme Court held that Sony was not liable for damages of contributory copyright infringement, ruling that where a product may be used for “substantial” or “commercially significant noninfringing uses,” it was not liable for infringement. On the other hand, Napster was different because it actually provided a network for the infringement to take place. The parties in Groskster eventually came to an agreement in which Grokster agreed to immediately discontinue its former business operations, and agreed to have a judgment and a permanent injunction entered against it in favor of the plaintiffs.

http://internetlaw.uslegal.com/piracy-and-file-sharing/after-napster/grokster/

Interesting blog post on “public entrepreneurship” by MItchell Weiss with the Harvard Business Review. I would challenge Weiss’ assertion that public leaders can truly act as entrepreneurs. Weiss believes that public entrepreneurs face the same predicament as any other entrepreneur, mainly in that they face substantial risk in pursuing a new opportunity and that it is difficult to both reduce risk without resources and to attract resources while risk is high. “Public entrepreneurs” however, do not really face the same risks as an entrepreneur in the private sector. They are backed with government resources, which is limited only by the operating budget granted to the project. In how many different situations can we think of examples where the government has pushed forward with bad ideas irrespective of cost. In the private sector, these unsuccessful ideas would be failures once the entrepreneurs limited resources ran out. In this respect, I don’t believe “government entrepreneurs” face the same risk and resource constraints of entrepreneurs in the private sector.

Link: http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/03/government-entrepreneur-is-not-an-oxymoron/