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I've discussed this in other threads before, but I think the way that you make money without DRM is by not trying to make entertainment on speculation.
Basically the entertainment companies go out right now, and make a movie/song/whatever, and spend a whole lot of money doing it, in hopes that they can then go and sell the end product over and over and over to make up the investment. There is really not any way to do this, without DRM. As I think DRM is fundamentally flawed, so is this business model. That doesn't mean it might not stick around for a few centuries, but it's eventually doomed.
The problem is that DRM tries to artifically limit the supply of something that requires very little labor in order to reproduce. The n-th copy of a digitally delivered Brittany Spears album costs virtually nothing; it's only the first copy that really costs a lot to make. (Okay, so this sets aside that the net value of any given Brittany Spears album may in fact be negative.)
In the past, since the recording companies basically controlled the means of producing more copies (vinyl/CD stamping factories), they could artificially inflate the cost of the marginal (that is, n-th) copy, in order to pay for a bit of that first one. The only reason this works is because they have a monopoly on the means of producing more copies. That's it.
What digital delivery, and computers/the Internet in general, do is make widely available the means of production. (Apologies if I'm sounding a little Marxist here, but it's tough to avoid the terminology.) When anyone can make that 'one last' copy, you can't fix the price of it anymore. You just can't. DRM is an attempt to put a finger in the dike, to make it artificially hard again to make an additional copy, but they have a whole lot of information theory working against them. There is no practical way, that I can envision, to allow people access to digital media which does not inherently give them an opportunity to copy it, particularly since copying is inherent to the digital distribution process. And this is only going to get more difficult in the future.
So given this, what to do? The answer is to make people pay in advance. There will always be a demand for new content; even with the entire past produce of human civilization on tap, it is the nature of people to want things that are fresh, that have been created specifically for them (whether individually or as a group). Rather than trying to make money up off of the marginal copies, which have little to no inherent value, charge for the first copy. Charge interested parties, in advance, for creation of the work. If people aren't interested in funding its creation, it doesn't get made. If fans want an artist to continue to produce, then they can pay to commission more albums. Rather than paying an inflated cost for each copy, which has some portion of the original labor's cost built into it, they will pay for the cost of that labor up front. It is the labor which is valuable, not the copies.
This of course would force a re-evaluation of both how we think of the relationship between artists and their public, and also of how much art we as a society produce (right now I think it's clear that we produce a surplus; we produce more new art than the public really demands, and one must understand that in a pay-in-advance system, this would no longer be supportable), but I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with it. As people demand new content, they will pay for it to be created. Either they will pay what it costs to create it, or it will not be made.
This is the way the market should work: as people desire novelty, the business models would be formed around the demand. Instead of a top-down approach, it's bottom-up; allowing consumer choice and demand to drive how people will make money. There are lots of ways that they could do it, from straight work-on-commission to more subtle crediting schemes, or donationware/threatware (e.g. "I'll write the next installment of the series only if I receive $10,000 by the end of the year..."). I could easily see whole systems of escrow and loans being set up, to ensure that consumers didn't get ripped off, while letting the creator know that they'll be paid upon completion of the work.
In short, there are ways to make the system work, in fact I think the demand for art in general is so great, you cannot possibly fail. DRM is only a necessity when you are wed to the industrial-age business model of both physical goods and centralized control of information-reproduction. When you shift the value from "intellectual property" to labor, everything becomes much simpler.
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2006-08-30, 02:38 AM
Linear Mode
