Marc Andreessen remarked recently a pro­pos the inter­net and the media, that most car com­pan­ies didn’t emerge from horse car­riage making.

Admit­tedly that sum­mary mis­rep­res­ents the long period of devel­op­ment of a whole host of automobile-related tech­no­lo­gies: fuel pro­cessing, engine devel­op­ment, machine tools.

Reu­ters boss — and former law­yer — Tom Glo­cer has another take, that I would sub­scribe to:

When you think of innov­a­tions in the music industry like the ori­ginal Nap­ster or Kazaa or the phe­nom­enal rise of You­Tube, one under­stands why it is not Uni­ver­sal Music or NBC which blazes the trail.

In the con­tent world, it must be admit­ted that a fair num­ber of start-ups adopt a legal pos­i­tion that could be best described as “we will worry about copy­right infringe­ment when we are suc­cess­ful.” Indeed, that is pre­cisely what is going on now as Google is reg­u­lar­iz­ing YouTube’s con­tent relationships.

Since I prac­tised law for many years I offer this defence of my former col­leagues: don’t blame the law­yers for once. If a product man­ager at NBC called upon the for­mid­able GE legal depart­ment and presen­ted a busi­ness plan that was based on ripping-off copy­right until the ser­vice was so pop­u­lar, fear­ful con­tent own­ers would no longer com­plain, he would be laughed out of Fairfield.

Big com­pan­ies with strin­gent com­pli­ance policies and now Sar­banes Oxley con­trols to attest to are just not going to take these risks. Nor should the junior product man­ager just not con­sult the law­yers for fear that he will get the “wrong answer.”

We must recog­nize that there are often legit­im­ate struc­tural reas­ons why most chal­lenges to the estab­lished order come from out­side the firm. This is also not a bad thing as it quite nat­ur­ally serves as a check on the dom­in­ance of large organ­iz­a­tions — per­haps far more effect­ively than anti­trust policy.