> It's not "rent seeking" to build a value-added service on top of publicly available information, or even to charge for making obscure publicly available information more easily available.
I'm inclined to agree. But perhaps "rent seeking" or not is not the right debate.
It's hard to tease out how much of the value of WL/Lexis/BL is in comprehensive access to cases and documents vs. how much comes from the kind of value added products/services that you mention.
An interesting question is just how valuable these value added services actually are. Whatever value they provide today might reasonably be discounted by their lack of defensibility going forward. As you noted, there is much room for technological disruption here. One could imagine dramatically better products (my thesis is that the right Silicon Valley startup can build them). If WL/Lexis/BL want to survive in the next 5-10 years, they are going to have to get away from publishing and push technology farther, either internally or by acquiring the very few startups who are doing interesting things in this space. What do you make of that thesis? It sounds to me like your thinking about their value add might be clarified by distinguishing between publishing and technology.
I'm inclined to agree. But perhaps "rent seeking" or not is not the right debate.
It's hard to tease out how much of the value of WL/Lexis/BL is in comprehensive access to cases and documents vs. how much comes from the kind of value added products/services that you mention.
An interesting question is just how valuable these value added services actually are. Whatever value they provide today might reasonably be discounted by their lack of defensibility going forward. As you noted, there is much room for technological disruption here. One could imagine dramatically better products (my thesis is that the right Silicon Valley startup can build them). If WL/Lexis/BL want to survive in the next 5-10 years, they are going to have to get away from publishing and push technology farther, either internally or by acquiring the very few startups who are doing interesting things in this space. What do you make of that thesis? It sounds to me like your thinking about their value add might be clarified by distinguishing between publishing and technology.