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Popular Music: The Means of Control other pages in this Pop Music web welcome | industry portrait | competitors | indies suppliers | substitutes and new entrants royalties | music software | WNY music | Kazaa links Economics / Markets || Technological / Architecture Political / Laws || Social Culture / Norms other copyright pages economics of information goods

In your organization, you can look at three levels of computer activity:

your computer
intra-organization intranet
inter-organization Internet

Your organization will range somewhere between the options in the two columns on the right in the table below.

closed private intranet: Let's treat the networked space just like the organization. No bill of rights. Top-down hierarchical control. Proprietary. Ownership of ideas. Permission/authorization needed for everything.

open public Internet: Let's treat the networked space just like the public commons. Bill of rights. Open source. No permission needed.

your computer: Let's scan for viruses, spam, and spyware. After that, it's my computer.

The incumbent music industry leaders, the Big Five multinationals, use all four means of control to fend off threats to the firm and to the industry from new entrants, substitutes, suppliers (musicians), and buyers. If they don't fight hard, they will not be fulfilling their obligations to their shareholders and to their corporate parents. The parents, of course, are taking the larger view and preparing for the day when their music divisions will lose.

Note |  The four related pages linked below try to separate everything into these four discrete means of control. Many items could be in more than one area.

Lessig's Four Means of Control

Economics / Markets || Technological / Architecture

Political / Laws || Social Culture / Norms

Corporations are accustomed to controlling their internal information environments, and especially to controlling, excuse me, constraining, their employee's behavior. The best they could to with their customers was to manipulate and exploit, excuse me, influencing their customers' behavior.

To the question becomes, how can the corporations, individually and collectively, control the Internet?

They can't, of course, but that doesn't stop them from trying hard. They must. The corporate managers must do their best to preserve, if not increase, profitability.

And, to no one's surprise, there's a whole security and rights management industry with products to feed these needs and their own marketing to manipulate and exploit these fears.

Why do I say two paragraphs above that "they can't, of course"? What's so inevitable about the Internet? Let's look at the history of disruptive technologies.