Welcome to Law & Chaos. I'm flying solo today so we're going to geek out about Anti-Trust Law, the 1980s, long distance telephone service, computer gaming, and so much more. It is a Trump-free show, so grab a beverage, settle in, and get ready for some nerdy fun. We got a lot to cover, so let's get after it. Happy Friday Chaos Monkeys, I'm Andrew Torres, and with me today is... Nobody Liz is out, but she will be back on our next episode. Since I'm alone with the keys, today's show uses the through line of computer video games, but even if you don't play games, this really about two legal concepts. The first is copyright. Do you own when you create anything on the computer? And the answer depends upon the most popular video game of 1981, and it is still the same legal test we use today. That's going to be our first story. And then for our second story, we're going to talk a bit about what used to be known as the phone company and then fast forward to the present. Because today, video games aren't simple, a bit quarter-munchers. They're considered e-sports. They're competitive. People pay thousands of dollars to buy high-end computer hardware to gain tiny edges over the competition. And there's a lawsuit about a company that's leveraging the fact that teenage kids want these super expensive rigs, but cannot afford them. It is predatory capitalism. It is a product of today's oligopolistic markets. And the fact that we broke the very concept of antitrust laws, and you'll have to wait and find out the consequences. So for our first story, I want to talk about... copyright. And it's about the one case that is really shaped the modern legal landscape for what counts as your protected expression when you write computer software and what doesn't. So in 1977, Atari released the video computer system. It's not what today we would call a computer. That's the wood grain and black plastic box that you probably know as the 2600. Took a few years to take off. But by the early 1980s, Atari's 2600 was the best-selling video game system in America. Atari created the video game industry. And here's where a Chicago-based chain of retail stores that sold billiards equipment, pool tables, balls, queues, chalk, that sort of thing enters the story. That chain was originally named Minnesota Fats after the character from the hustler, Jackie Gleason. But Minnesota Fats was going through a transition to rename itself as Video King. So it had this tagline that said, The Billiard King is also the Video King. Anyway, on November 13, 1981, just before the holiday season, Minnesota Fats slashed the Video King, ran an ad in the Chicago Tribune, and also the Chicago Sun Tides. And at the top of the ad was a line drawing of the Atari 2600 being pod by Santa Claus, saying, I'm on my way. And it sold for $144.88. That's about $500 in today's money, which is a pretty nice holiday gift for kids. Directly below the Atari 2600 was a smaller ad for what was then Atari's largest competitor back in 1981, the Mattel in Television. Now, the Intellivision sold for $250 nearly twice as much. But next to that was an ad for yet another video game system. The number three competitor, the Magnavox Odyssey 2, and it sold for $139. $5 bucks cheaper than the Atari. And Odyssey 2 had better technological specifications, could run more complicated and better games. It had this membrane keyboard. So if the Magnavox Odyssey was cheaper and better than the Atari, why have you probably never heard of it? You've definitely heard of Atari. And I think the answer might be this one exact advertisement that ran in the Tribune. So Minnesota Fats slashed the video king, had some ad copy next to the Magnavox Odyssey. It said, just hit KC Munchkin. If you're wondering what the hell is KC Munchkin, I'm glad you asked. And so was the ad. It had this helpful little parenthetical under KC Munchkin that said, a Pac-Man type game. And who, boy? KC Munchkin is in fact a Pac-Man type game, a very Pac-Man type game. You control an animated circle thing with a V-shaped mouth that navigates the remains, cobbling dots, and avoiding ghost monsters. Some of the dots give you a temporary power-up that let you turn around and eat the monsters, at which point they disappear down to their eyes, and they respawn in a box in the middle of the screen. But that sounds exactly like Pac-Man. That sounds exactly like Pac-Man. Okay, I need to tell you, KC Munchkin is not exactly identical to Pac-Man. Put a pin in that for now. Because you also need to know two more things. The first, if you're one of our younger listeners, is that Pac-Man was the most successful coin-operated video game of 1981. It was a cultural phenomenon. Like most successful is a huge understanding. There was a song about Pac-Man that unironically charted that people would call up and listen to. There was Pac-Man, serial, Pac-Man, Slurpy's, Pac-Man, Popsicles, Pac-Man, Pasta, Pac-Man, Cartoon, you get the picture. And second, Atari didn't create Pac-Man, but they had purchased the rights to produce a home video game version of Pac-Man. But in November of 1981, that 2600 version of Pac-Man was still under development. It would not come out until early 1982. See, the dilemma here, right? Minnesota Fats was essentially advertising in the Chicago Tribune. Hey, mom and dad, if you want to give your kids a Christmas present up being able to play the most popular video game Pac-Man at home, line up by the Magnavox instead of the Atari and at the same price. As you can imagine, Atari's legal department saw the ad and immediately lost their minds. They sent some folks at the Minnesota Fats to try and buy a copy of Casey Munchkin. It took two trips because the first time they were sold out. And the sales clerks, the second time around, were like, oh, Casey Munchkin, yeah, that's just like Pac-Man. It's the Odyssey version of Pac-Man. It's as good as Pac-Man, right? If you're Atari, especially if you're the lawyers at Atari, you're sitting and thinking, wait a minute, we just paid a lot of money to license the actual Pac-Man. Now this knockoff is going to come and outsell us during the holiday season? No way. So, Atari ran to federal court to sue Magnavox to get an injunction to force them to pull Casey Munchkin off the shelves. Before we get to what happened, I want to present the other side. Obviously, I have been building up the case for Atari pulling this knockoff from the shelves, right? I'm even using loaded language like knockoff. But I think you can make an equally good argument against pulling it off the shelves. Because Casey Munchkin isn't exactly like Pac-Man, right? Pac-Man, the levels have 244 fixed dots, 240 tiny little ones, and four power pellets at each corner. Casey Munchkin levels only have 22 dots, and the dots move away from you, right? The more you eat, the more the dots move. So it's kind of like Pac-Man crossed with space invaders, right? It plays very, very differently. And Casey Munchkin, you can make your own mazes. They're randomly generated mazes. And so Casey Munchkin is a much better game than Pac-Man and the licensed version of Pac-Man that Atari would release for the 2600 sucks. It is one of the very worst video games of all time. So Pac-Man, no, Casey Munchkin, yes. And okay, visual similarity, what do you want? It's 1981. Sure, both characters are kind of like a circle, but like, again, isn't 1981? Basically, everything is a circle or a square or a triangle. You're really telling me that Atari can lock up the rights to the concept of eat the dots in a maze before the bad guys who are kind of rectangles get in no way. That's insane. He would work Burger King, right? Now, let's imagine you were dropped here from a foreign planet, right? And you say, what's a whopper? I promise you that the sales clerks will say, hey, have you ever had a Big Mac? It's kind of like our version of that, right? And that's all that the sales clerks were saying about Casey Munchkin. It's kind of, this is our version of Pac-Man. It's our version of the Big Mac. And those two polls really set up one of the longest standing debates when it comes to the legal concept of copyright, right? You can't copyright an idea like, let's take two cheap-o fast food burgers and put them on three buns with some thousand island dressing, right? You can only protect your unique elements. You can't call something the Big Mac. You can't use their song, right? So the question for the courts came down to what parts of Pac-Man were the unique elements and which were just an idea. And we'll get into that. After this brief ad break, unless of course you are a subscriber over at lawncastpod.com or on our Patreon at patreon.com slash law and chaos pod. At which point you get the show ad free, you get the extended episode, you get our bonus episode, you get all the goodies and you help keep lawncasts on the air. For everybody else, we're going to take a quick ad break and we will be back. And we're back. And now spoilers for a 44-year-old court case, I guess. So Atari lost at the trial court level, but they won on appeal to the seventh circuit. And the seventh circuit said we're going to issue the injunction, Casey Munchkin, was pulled from the shelves. The seventh circuit said it was okay to copy the idea of Pac-Man, right? Atari didn't own the concept of a maze game, here's what the court said. The maze and scoring table are standard game devices and the tunnel exits are nothing more than the commonly used wrap-around concept adapted to a maze chase game. Similarly the use of dots provides a mean by which a player's performance can be gauged and rewarded with the appropriate number of points and by which to inform the player of his or her progress. So the court said you can't lock up the concept of a maze game Atari. But then they said, but there's nothing about a maze that forces you to put ghosts in it, right? Those are the elements that become the expressions that can be protected, so continuing. The expression of the central figure as a gobler and the pursuit figures as ghost monsters distinguishes Pac-Man from conceptually similar video games. The Casey Munchkin Gobler has several blatantly similar features, including the relative size and shape of the body, the V-shaped mouth, its distinctive gobbling action with appropriate sounds, you know, waka waka waka, and especially the way in which it disappears upon being captured. An examination of the Casey Munchkin ghost monsters reveals even more significant visual similarities. In size, shape, manner of movement, they are virtually identical to their Pac-Man counterparts. Casey Munchkin's monsters, for example, exhibit the same peculiar eye and leg movement. Both games moreover express the role reversal and regeneration process with such great similarity that an ordinary observer could conclude only that Phillips, that's the parent company of Magnavox, copied plaintiffs Pac-Man. Okay, so that's where the curriculum at, but what about the arguments that I raised, right? So what about the unique elements in Casey Munchkin, right? The fact that you're a little gobler, smiled and frowned, or that there were different mazes, even user-created mazes. The court said, none of that matters. They said, it is irrelevant that Casey Munchkin has other game modes, which employ various maze configurations. The only mode that concerns the court is the one that uses the display most similar to the one in Pac-Man. And you know, when put that way, I guess that makes a kind of sense, right? Like if I steal a chapter from Stephen King, and I stick it in the middle of a story that I wrote, I've still infringed on Stephen King's copyright. He can still sue me and make me take it out. And that's essentially what Atari was asking for here. But now, let's get to what I thought was the best argument. What about the difference in gameplay between Pac-Man and Casey Munchkin? You know, the Casey Munchkin was a much better game. Well, the seventh circuit said, that was also irrelevant. Here's what they said. The defendants and the District Court, that's Magnavox and the District Court that ruled against Atari, stressed that Casey Munchkin plays differently because of the moving dots and the variety of maze configurations from which the player can choose. The focus in a copyright infringement action, however, is on the similarities in protectable expression. So, 40 years later, that part of the holding seems very weird to me, and I think it'll seem weird to you, right? I think that what the seventh circuit is saying is that if the look of the two games is substantially similar, it doesn't matter how the game actually plays. At all. So, if I copy the visual style of Pac-Man, I could change the game entirely. I could let you play as the ghost. I could let you play as the maze. I'm not sure how that would work out. But none of that would be relevant for purposes of copyright, and that seems strange today. Because when we think about video games, when we think about interactive entertainment, the gameplay is far more important than the visual elements when you think about what elements should be protected by copyright, right? Particularly mega studios like Activision that spend years, they hire voice actors, they have motion capture, right? This is really storytelling in game form, even when you trend towards the action games. But you can see how... I mean, none of that was possible in 1981. So, the first court, the first appellate court to really wrestle with this emerging technology said about applying the concepts they knew from existing copyright law. And that was the copyright of first books and then movies, right? And in books, it is the depictions that matter. In the movies, it is the actual physical appearance that matters. And so, you can understand why the seventh circuit said, we're not going to look at the gameplay at all. We're going to look at the visual elements, we're going to let you copyright those. And here's the bottom line, here's the holding. Based on an ocular comparison of the two works, we conclude that Atari clearly showed a likelihood of success on the merits. Although not virtually identical to Pac-Man, Casey Munchkin captures the total concept and feel of and is substantially similar to Pac-Man. And that holding is still the rule today. Another question for purposes of copyright infringement is, does one piece of software capture the total concept and feel of another piece of software? And that means there are no hard and fast lines. There's no fixed rule. It is a case by case basis. Now, today's video games are a lot more complicated than the eight-bit Pac-Man world. They're not simple, they're not copyable like that. So this exact situation is not likely to recur particularly in video games. But what about when you create a word processor or a database or an operating system? This same framework still applies today. You can't copyright the way that the program works. You can't copyright the idea, but you can copyright the elements that don't have to be there. The ghosts, the yellow gobler, the look and feel. And that legal landscape exists and governs today because a billhards company ran an ad that caused the lawyers at Atari to freak out. Oh, and by the way, as we said, Atari got its injunction. That Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man sold more than 8 million cartridges. It was the biggest selling title on the Atari 2600 by a wide margin. And Magnavox, on the other hand, went out of the video game business about a year later. The better game lost, and it's because three judges on the seventh circuit thought that they couldn't use a gobler. OK. We're going to stick around in 1982 for a minute because now that we've talked about how copyright law hasn't really changed over the last four decades, we're going to talk about something that has changed drastically, not in the law, but in its enforcement. And I'm talking about antitrust. Antitrust has, as its core, the enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act. That makes it illegal for any person to engage in any contract in restraint of trade in interstate commerce. That is 15 USC one. 15 USC two makes it illegal to monopolize or attempt to monopolize or combine or conspire with any person or persons to monopolize any part of interstate commerce. That's still the law today. But enforcement of antitrust is left to the executive branch. It's split between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission on essentially subject matter grounds. It really, that would be a rather trail too far. A back in 1982 antitrust was something that both political parties still believed in. Oh, I'll be at a different degrees. As opposed to, I would say somewhere between 0 and 1-half of a political party today. The classic monopoly in the 1980s was AT&T. The phone company. If you're one of our younger listeners, I'm not sure how to convey to you how ridiculous making phone calls was in the 1980s, right? If somebody lived more than about 30 miles away from you, you had to pay long distance fees by the minute for your phone calls. You had to buy your phone and plug it into the wall from the phone company. Here, you know what? I'm going to let Lily Tomlin explain. Here at the phone company, we handle $84 billion calls a year, serving everyone from presidents and kings to the scum of the earth. So we realize that every so often, you can't get an operator for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order. Perhaps you've been charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care. Just like this. Just lost theoria. You see, this phone system consists of a multi-billion-dollar matrix of space-age technology that is so sophisticated. If you think we can't handle it, I'll get your problem as much. So the next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two fixing cups of the spring? If we don't care, we don't have to. to play the phone company. Yay! Why don't you get yourself to Dixie Cups and Substring is pretty good lay way of explaining monopoly power. So in 1974, the Republican Department of Justice under Republican President Gerald Ford filed an antitrust enforcement lawsuit against AT&T. Now, that lawsuit didn't exactly move quickly, antitrust never does, but consider this. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won a surprise landslide over incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter to become the most conservative president in at least half a century. Republicans flipped 12 seats in the Senate to win control of that body for the first time in 30 years. They also picked up 35 seats in the House of Representatives. That really was a political revolution that moved our country drastically to the right. And the lawsuit against AT&T was still pending when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. And what I want to emphasize by contrast is that it would have been literally unthinkable that Ronald Reagan's Department of Justice was going to drop the case, right? Even with a conservative administration, AT&T knew it had to fight in court. It feared losing in court, and it also feared getting slapped down with harsh regulation by Congress. And a Congress that had moved substantially to the right with legislation that could be vetoed by a very conservative president. Despite all of that, AT&T was still concerned about the enforcement of antitrust law. And in 1982, a U.S. District Court judge indeed denied AT&T had moved to dismiss that complaint and a judge denied that motion to dismiss and said as part of that denial that as a matter of first impression, basically preliminarily finding that AT&T had indeed violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. In a bunch of ways, remember the phones that you had to buy from the phone company turns out AT&T's wholly owned subsidiary, Western Electric manufactured those phones at AT&T skimmed off profits both coming and going. They also gouged consumers on long distance calls, you know, typical monopolist stuff. And so in 1982, AT&T came up with a plan whereby it would divest itself of the parts of the company that actually carried telephone services to its end customers. Today, what we would call telecommunications, which is massively profitable. We'll get to that in a second. Those services would be spun off into seven new regional companies that were called the baby bells. That settlement got approved January 1, 1984. And I just want to say parenthetically that when I learned about this case in my antitrust class in law school back in the late 90s, it was pitched as a win for AT&T for reasons that I hope maybe we'll do another deep dive on someday. But all of that, right? AT&T's willingness to divest itself of the local carriers was predicated on a functioning government and functioning antitrust law that even a conservative pro-business administration would at least protect consumers from obvious monopolies. It's all been basically downhill ever since. And by downhill, I mean that those telecom companies that split off from AT&T over the next decades would merge with each other. In fact, one of them, Southern Bell, became SBC communications and bought its former parent AT&T. Of the original AT&T and the seven regional spin-offs, they have all been consolidated down to just two companies, AT&T and Verizon. What was impermissible, blatantly impermissible in 1982 is just fine today. And if you've dealt with AT&T or Verizon, we're the phone company. We don't care, we don't have to probably rang a little too true to you in that clip. We're going to get into another specific implication of the death of antitrust law after our next ad break. And we're back. Talk about another monopolistic restraint of trade. The largest company in the world by market capitalization isn't Microsoft or Amazon or Apple or Google or Tesla. It is NVIDIA. And NVIDIA makes essentially one product, Graphics Processing Units or GPUs. The heart of your home computer is the CPU central processing unit, right? That's the brain of your home PC. The GPU takes some of the demands off of the CPU so that your computer doesn't slow to a crawl every time it has to draw something on the screen, right? So that's how it split out. But then it turned out, almost by accident, that the way in which GPUs handle information turned out to be spectacularly useful for other tasks beyond rendering graphics on the screen. First, that was solving the complex math equations that were used in mining cryptocurrency. And then, most recently, in training large language models. And that meant NVIDIA went from being a company that made the graphics card for your PC, which is, okay, that's a good niche to be in, to being the company that supplies compute for the data centers that power AI. And that is way more lucrative. So as the other largest tech companies in the world started dumping tens of billions of dollars into AI, NVIDIA's revenues rocketed into the stratosphere. And here's what I mean by that. They went from a $1 billion year company in 2018 to $10 billion to $100 billion to $187 billion in revenue last year. And almost all of their revenue now comes from the six largest other companies who are investing in AI, who are buying AI compute. And therefore are buying NVIDIA GPUs. Just two years ago, NVIDIA's revenues were mostly from consumers buying the graphics cards. Now they are 10 to 1 from AI data centers. So as NVIDIA grew on the backs of AI data centers, buying billions of dollars of ultra high-end GPUs, that allowed NVIDIA to pretty much drive out all of their other competitors for making the graphics cards that go into your computer. Okay, AMD still has a bit of the market share. And theoretically, you can buy one from Intel, but the test isn't a lot of competition to go around. And I worry that we're going back. We effectively have just two GPU manufacturers with the lion share going to NVIDIA. So there's a real competition that's driving down the costs of these high-end graphics cards. And there's a huge barrier to entry. This is typical monopolistic practice. I lose an eye couldn't start a GPU manufacturing business tomorrow. And that means, particularly when it comes to high-end gaming, there's virtually no competition. You have to buy an NVIDIA graphics card. Some of those graphics cards are $1,000. Some are $2,000. That is just the card, not the computer. By the way, the same consolidation is true with computer RAM, right? The memory in your PC that powers the CPU. There are just three companies that manufacture computer RAM. And one of those three, Micron, announced in December of 2025 that it was no longer going to produce RAM for the home computer market. It would exclusively sell to, you guessed it, massive AI data centers because that's where the money is. So now, there are just two companies that produce RAM for your home computer. There are just two companies that produce home computer CPUs. You get the picture. All of this consolidation, again, means that there's not the sufficient competition to keep prices down. And that means, if you are, let's say, a teenage boy with aspirations to be a competitive gamer, you cannot afford a high-end gaming computer rig. And this is where the general concept of antitrust really hits home. As we're going to enter NZXT, a computer manufacturer, from here on out, I want to be clear about my sources. One is the lawsuit, which is Burns versus Fragile Inc. It was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. And as footnote one to that complaint documents, the real initial investigative legwork was done here by Steve Burke at Gamers, Nexus, who's a fabulous YouTube content creator. I will link to his channel in the show notes. I want to shout out really good high-quality, independent investigative reporting and make it clear that I am quoting from the allegations in the lawsuit and that expose. OK. NZXT makes high-end gaming PCs, and the business has, or at least had, two components to it. One was selling you the computer. The other was renting you the computer. So the $3,000 gaming rig rented at $259 a month. And when I say rent, I mean rent, not rent to own. I mean you pay that $260 every month for the privilege of using their machine. Put a pin in that for a minute. Because NZXT started a full-court press to market those rentals to the aforementioned teenage boys, right? They lined up a lot of content creators. And the ads said things like you can now own and game on a PC starting at $59 a month on NZXT's new subscription flex program. And now that was never true. If you signed up for NZXT's subscription flex, you don't own the computer ever. You rent it at what Gamers Nexus shows are. You serious rates of interest they would be worse than getting a loan shark from the mafia is a pretty good expose. Anyway, NZXT did pull that ad. They had a bunch of other ads that looked pretty bad. One, that urged kids to convince your parents to join the subscription program. And the online order form did not have age verification. So you see how this looks pretty bad. And there was a bunch of other misleading stuff like advertising a lifetime warranty under the subscription program, which makes no sense on something you don't own. There was a restocking fee if you rented the computer and returned it in the first month after, say, your mom discovered that you're paying nearly $300 a month to rent a computer. Now, the fine print in the contract said, this subscription is not a rent to own program. At no point will subscriber own the rental devices provided under the subscription, even if subscriber payments aggregate to more than the collective retail price for all services. Good disclaimer. If subscriber seeks to purchase their rental device, NZXT may, but is not required to extend subscriber an option to purchase their rental devices and any additional services which operator chooses to include. Operator may provide a discount on such a, you get the picture. All that seems real bad, but it gets worse. And we will be back with how it gets worse after the last ad break. Okay, kids, sign up your parents and get them to rent you a computer. Seems like a predatory business model burying the disclaimers in the fine print that no one was going to read. Seems like a bad thing, but here's the part that looks real bad. Because at the time that this complaint was filed, you could go on to the NZXT website and switch between the buy tab and the subscribe tab. Now remember, subscribe is rent, right? NZXT's computers all had names. So they had the player one PC, the player two PC, the player two prime PC, the player three PC and so on, right? You went up the list. And then, well, in fact, let me just read paragraphs 51 through 54 in the complaint. 51. Defendants advertised player PCs with specific components that were of a certain quality, standard, and grade, but less ease, those are the people who clicked the subscribe tab and rent it, instead received materially and substantially inferior products. To demonstrate, one program, Leszy, rented a player three PC that NZXT advertised as containing an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card, retail value $1,600 for sale, but least to the Leszy, a player three PC with an RTX 4080 super retail value $1,000 during the same time period, a 37% downgrade in value, and a substantial downgrade in performance. NZXT's website and product naming were deceptive in design, as defendants used the same model names across buy and subscribe options while knowingly providing inferior and lower value components when the consumer subscribed, that is, rented. Due to the website design and the design of the buy subscribe button, plaintiffs could not see the hardware specifications and benchmarks change when switching between the buy and subscribe on the website. Okay. Let me put that in English. That means if you clicked on the high end player three PC to buy it, it showed you the configuration that included that super premium $1,600 graphics card, the Nvidia RTX 4090. Then when you clicked over to subscribe, meaning that you were going to rent it, it kept the same name, the player three PC, but it switched to a lower spec cheaper component. I don't know about you, but when I buy a computer and it comes to my home, I don't break out the benchmarking tools to see if I got the 4080 or the 4090, I just trust that the company has sold me the rig that they promised to sell me. Here, the allegation is that NZXT provided substantially inferior hardware within the least player PCs compared to purchased player PCs of the same model name, which permitted them to quote offload older and inferior inventory end of quote. So this lawsuit has 14 different causes of action. It has a bunch of state unfair trade practice and deceptive advertising claims. It has some breach of contract claims. It has two civil recon claims and it has multiple class action allegations. But good news question mark. Last week, the parties filed a status report saying that they mediated the case and reached an agreement in principle on how to settle this case. There's another proposed status report that is due at the end of the month and I'll give you an update on that. Because this is a class action, any settlement is going to require court approval, right? If private parties who sue each other can generally settle their disputes without the court sign off, but if you're representing a class of plaintiffs, the court weighs in to make sure that the settlement is fair or not. So I at least will be watching. But I guess I want to end with one last trip to 1980s nostalgia and the thing that I'm worried we're all losing with the death of antitrust. You think back to the first segment, I have to confess something to you. I never owned an Atari 2600 and that's because I owned an Atari computer. Now, you might be surprised to learn that Atari made computers. Not because even though they were great machines for their time, they got outcompeted by Commodore. You've definitely heard of the Commodore 64. That's what I use as the punchline in the joke instead of the Atari 800 because the Commodore 64 was the most successful home computer of all time. The reason for that is the Commodore drove prices down to rock bottom territory. They took what was a very specialized hobbyist industry in the late 1970s. And in the early 1980s turned it into a mass market. By 1985, you could buy a Commodore 64 for about a hundred bucks. The Commodore philosophy was to create the market, to put a computer in every home. That worked. And part of what made it work was vibrant competition rate. IBM was huge. They were in the home computer market at the time. But their first PC was insanely expensive. And their second PC was expensive and terrible. And you also had offerings from Apple, from Atari, from Commodore, from Tandy, from Texas Instruments, even the TimeX Watch Company. That's its own super fascinating story. And I could name a dozen more very, very obscure, very minor players. And all of that was possible because of antitrust. AT&T was willing to divest itself of its local carriers, right? The same hugely profitable telecom companies that came back and bought AT&T 20 years later. Because AT&T was planning to enter the home computer market. It wanted to use Western Digital to manufacture and produce those home computers that obviously didn't work out. But that desire to compete to enter these emerging markets is different from the world we have today. We have a world in which a few companies own all of the inputs for computers. And even adjusted for inflation, that $3,000 gaming rig today is 10 times as expensive as the Commodore 64 was in 1985. And the idea that 40 years on instead of trying to put a computer in everyone's home, we now have this model where maybe people will be forced to rent computers instead of owning them because everything is too expensive. Well, it feels like we need to make antitrust great again. Okay. Thanks for sticking with me today as we geeked out. I hope you enjoyed this discussion of copyright and antitrust law. And if you liked a little bit of geekery, I do have a story on Magic the Gathering that I'm just waiting to break out. Let us know. And look, either way, Liz will be back. I promise we're going to have written content for you on Monday and another episode of the show with both of us on Tuesday. And until then, if you can head on over and subscribe to support the show on patreon.com slash lawncast pod, we would really, really appreciate it. If you can't, obviously take care of you and yours first, but it would help us out a great deal if you could give us a five star review on your podcast listening vehicle of choice. Read us a nice review. Give us five stars. Help us get the show out. And I will see you. We will see you next week. Have a great weekend. Law and chaos podcast is production of Razips Media LLC. It's intended solely as entertainment. It does not constantly go by. It does not form an attorney client relationship. This show is research and written by Liz Dye and produced by Bryce Blank and Angle. Law and chaos pod, copyright, Razips and Media LLC. All rights reserved. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. 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