HW3: Digital music
1a. Logistics
- The third homework assignment (HW3) is
due at 5 p.m. on October 30, 2003.
- Late homeworks will not be accepted
without Deans' excuses.
- You must do this assignment by yourself; no collaboration
with other students is allowed.
- Submit all homeworks online. Homework
submission instructions are on the class website.
- Please address questions about HW3 to
the TAs, Wesley Maness and
kevin DOT chang AT yale DOT edu.
1b. Instructions
The popular-music
distribution business is widely believed to be in trouble.
Traditional business models, most notably sales of CD albums, are not
as profitable as they once were, and major-label record companies have
not (yet) managed to build successful new business models using
Internet-based distribution. The purpose of this assignment is
for your to think constructively and/or analytically about
popular-music distribution in the Internet age.
Write a three-page essay in which you propose a "solution" to the
ongoing troubles in the mainstream popular-music distribution
business. Approaches that you may take in this essay include but
are not limited to:
- Propose a business model (or, more generally, a strategy) that
existing major labels could use successfully given the current legal
and technological infrastructure. Give an argument for why this
approach would succeed. You may defend an approach that is
already being tried (e.g. iTunes)
or design your own.
- Propose a change to existing copyright law that would enable
more profitable popular-music distribution given the current
technological infrastructure but would not destroy the basic goal of
copyright law "to promote progress in science and the useful arts," e.g., by promoting public access
to cultural works.
- Propose a change to the current technological infrastructure
that would enable more profitable popular-music distribution given
current copyright law but would not destroy the basic flexibility and
usefulness of today's Internet.
- Argue that popular-music distribution is inherently less
profitable in the Internet age than it was in certain earlier periods (e.g., "the CD age").
2. Requirements
Prepare your essay using
Word or whatever text editor your prefer. If you need to submit
any "related" files in addition to this text file, combine all files
using WinZip or whatever compression program you used in HW1 and
HW2. Submit either your text file or your zip file using the same
instructions that
you used in HW1 and HW2.