One Consequence of Price Discrimination by Intellectual Monopolists Is that They Artificially Degrade Their Products in Certain Markets As Not to Compete with Other More Lucrative Markets

Effective price discrimination is costly to implement and this cost represents pure waste. For example, music producers love digital rights management (DRM) because it enables them to price discriminate. The reason that DVDs have country codes, for example, is to prevent cheap DVDs sold in one country from being resold in another country where they have a higher price. Yet the effect of DRM is to reduce the usefulness of the product. One of the reasons that the black market in MP3s is not threatened by legal electronic sales is that the unprotected MP3 is a superior product to the DRM-protected legal product. Similarly, producers of computer software sell crippled products to consumers in an effort to price discriminate and preserve their more lucrative corporate market. One consequence of price discrimination by monopolists, especially intellectual monopolists, is that they artificially degrade their products in certain markets so as not to compete with other more lucrative markets.

--Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 71.