This chapter introduces the threats to product longevity and durability created by legal frameworks and product design decisions that shift power from consumers to device makers. In contrast to earlier generations of technology, today’s devices—from smartphones and headphones to medical and agricultural equipment—are designed to be replaced, not repaired.

The chapter historicises the economics of music in the current age of technological automation – from the invention of intellectual property to the implementation of lock-down technologies at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first section sketches the basic characteristics of music’s technological, legal and political economies. By the late twentieth century, the precarious markets for music – enclosed within large-scale cycles of boom and bust in the nineteenth century – had morphed into a relatively stable set of intersecting industrial networks, including print, radio and phonograph. The second section sketches a transition period for the music industry in the context of distributed digital networks that emerged after the Cold War, producing a disjuncture between practice and policy. The third section traces the dialectics of intellectual property regimes pertaining to digital rights management, arguing that a covert allomorphism of the law effectively disabled both technical and legal functionalities pertaining to music.

Chapter 10 takes a broader look at IP protection as an incentive to innovate. Patent protection gaps brought about by 3D printing technology must be viewed in conjunction with how the technology dramatically lowers the costs of innovation (and imitation) for 3D printable goods. Moreover, although patents serve as a primary incentive to innovate, they are not the only incentive. The chapter looks at other IP rights, contracts, and extra-legal appropriability mechanisms, as well as nonmonetary incentives to innovate, to determine how the IP regime should respond to 3D printing technology. I describe the need for a better empirical understanding of 3D printing’s effects on innovation incentives, but I argue that current evidence does not suggest a need for stronger IP incentives for 3D printable goods. Therefore, radical changes to patent law are not necessary even in the face of de facto weakened patents. In addition, because copyright protection is not needed as an extra incentive for utilitarian innovation, copyright law should not protect DMFs of primarily utilitarian objects.