Since we are now starting with our projects, I found this article interesting, because it shows the importance of policy to entrepreneurship and presents data that shows that regulation indeed plays a crucial role in the individual decision to start a new business.

The syllabus this week advises us to focus on the current Court’s attitude towards tech and innovation. According to a recent article by New York Times, a case currently before the Court could have large implications on how the Court regulates tech, or signals to Congress how to do so.

There have been recent calls for anti-trust regulation of large tech companies, according to NYT, “[o]n Monday the Court heard Ohio v. American Express, a case centering on a technical but critical question about how to analyze harmful conduct by firms that serve multiple groups of users.” And, although “the case concerns the credit card industry, it could have sweeping ramifications for the way in which antitrust law gets applied generally, especially with regards to the tech giants.”

Here’s an interesting New York Times piece from 1984:

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/25/business/the-troubled-world-of-disney.html?pagewanted=all

And check this out, by comparison….

https://www.statista.com/topics/1824/disney/

Well, well, well — check this out, will ya??

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8085951/us-vinyl-album-sales-nielsen-music-record-high-2017

According to Jeff Bezos, there is no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning. Presumably, law is an institution and thus, can be improved with machine learning. However, one major problem is that the law is poorly written and convoluted, which creates a substantial knowledge gap between lawyers and everyone else. As a result, it appears unsupervised learning techniques will be most often used in legal analysis. For example, IBM and the Air Force are just dumping legal documents and and writing algorithms to look for, and learn from patterns. If the law develops new ways of structuring and organizing its data input then supervised and reinforcement learning techniques can be implemented sooner, drastically improving the role of artificial intelligence in the law. Luckily, for now at least, machine learning generally requires the work of a human indexer for data processing and collection, so it may take a few years before we see dramatic job displacement.

This law firm recapped the holding of Aereo and gave insight into the impact of the decision.

“Remote DVR systems have been found to be acceptable in other contexts, so it is possible that Aereo’s service could continue as a DVR-only service, should it re-emerge from bankruptcy. Or, someday, perhaps another streaming-type service with DVR-like functionality will emerge to take its place.”

If you search for Aereo now, you’ll be redirected to TiVo, who purchased Aereo, which makes me wonder what design TiVo uses to be able to get around the Supreme Court holding that banned Aereo.

The Aereo case and the related articles made me question our protection of the big networks. Has it impeded the growth of innovation?

I have attached an article that details the shift away from satellite tv packages and toward online streaming services. If the big providers do not adapt and create their own streaming services, will satellite tv packages become obsolete?

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/02/21/business/21reuters-dish-network-results.html

Last week in class we discussed Disney’s involvement in the Sony decision, and how it was actually most likely extremely beneficial to Disney that their side lost the case. This was because Disney movies, and the merchandising that goes along with them, have been very lucrative.

I found this recent article though, which describes another legal battle that Disney has initiated related to its movies and copyright. This past December, Disney filed suit against Redbox seeking to obtain an injunction that would force Redbox to stop including in its movie rentals digital download codes for Disney films. Apparently, Redbox sells digital download codes that it finds in the physical copies of Disney movies that it purchases. However, a California federal judge denied the injunction and has accused Disney of “copyright misuse.” Evidently, copyright law states that once customers buy a physical copy of a movie, they are free to sell the download codes. The next hearing in the case will be held tomorrow, March 5, on Redbox’s motion to dismiss.

Often times start-ups don’t have the resources to hire an attorney to make them aware of all of the legal implications that comes with starting a company and in turn, they aren’t aware of all the bases that they need to cover.  This article that was just published today on the National Law Review gives a breakdown of the types of intellectual property that exists and why it’s important for start-up companies to protect it.  Although it is brief, I think this is a good starting point for those interested in creating a start-up to read and be aware of.

Shortly after the Aereo’s Supreme Court case, the company filled for bankruptcy, as explained in this article. Currently, Aereo still keeps its website alive with a single page advertising Tivo’s product as the one that “keeps Aereo’s dream alive.”

There are several articles (for example this one) arguing that the Court ruling injected uncertainty in the copyright regulation and demotivated the startups interested in changing the current TV model.

I believe that is indeed bad when new business cannot predict how courts or regulators will rule their activity. However, I have a hard time considering that was Aereo’s case. As Justice Scalia pointed out, Aereo seemed more to be looking for “loophole” in the regulation, rather than developing a new product. It is great when new technology provides easier and cheaper products to meet consumers expectations. However, it does not seem to be fair when such innovations come as the way of “free riders” of pre-existing products. Like in the Napster case, here Aereo seem to be commercializing a product at the expense of the ones who really incur in the costs of its production. My opinion is that government should support new technologies that can be disruptive without damaging other company’s rights, as Spotify and Netflix, for example, seems to do.