Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Thursday, August 16th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, Amazon might buy a chain of movie theaters.

Why the Saudis invest the way they do.

Twitter pisses everyone off because what else is new?

And reviews of the Note 9 and Android Pie are in. and I guess if you're Jeff Bezos and you really, really want your Amazon Prime video to become

a Netflix level player and you're willing to do things like buy Whole Foods simply because you want to break into groceries in a big way.

Then why not do something bold like get into movie theaters?

According to Bloomberg, Amazon is in talks to acquire Landmark

Theaters, a chain of about 50-plus movie theaters that tends to focus on

Indie Movie Fair. Landmark is owned by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, who's Cuban's

partner from way back in the broadcast.com days, but Amazon is apparently not the

only suitor and supposedly Netflix is sniffing around a theater chain purchase as well.

Interesting bit of history here, even though this wouldn't be the biggest acquisition in the world by any means, it might actually trigger

a historically significant bit of antitrust law.

The so-called Paramount Pictures Consent Decree came out in 1948 as the result of a Supreme Court case that said

film studios could no longer own the movie theaters their films were shown in.

That Decree effectively destroyed the classic Hollywood studio system as it

functioned during the heyday of movies when for example during the Great Depression

fully 90% of the American public attended at least one movie every single week.

The law is now considered to be outdated and anachronistic, of course, and US antitrust officials

have recently signaled that the judgment could be

terminated.

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