Entry into the market for online distribution of digital content: economic and legal ramifications

Consumer options for consuming creative content in digital form, such as music, movies, books, and television shows, have increased significantly with the development of the Internet. Entrants into the distribution stage of production have developed new business models to deliver digital content in general and copyrighted digital content in particular. The objective of this paper is to analyse the development of competition in the delivery of digital content to consumers. In particular, the focus is on new technologies that facilitate online dissemination of digital content to consumers through the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and video hosting sites that have proliferated over the Internet since the late 1990s. The role of copyright as a potential competitive weapon by incumbent disseminators is joined in the analysis. P2P file sharing networks and video sharing web sites are viewed as entrants into the market for the dissemination of digital content to consumers. The incumbent technologies for distributing content have reacted aggressively to this new source of competition and have pursued legal, economic, and moral strategies to combat the use of authorised and unauthorised content by the distribution entrants. Perhaps the most important point to keep in mind is that online distribution, both authorised and unauthorised, is here to stay