From: Stephen D. Williams (sdw@lig.net)
Date: Wed Jun 14 2000 - 20:51:27 PDT
"Adam L. Beberg" wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Yak Wax wrote:
>
> > It's important to remember that *right now I can get music, movies,
> > and software for free and nobody can do anything to stop me* -
> > micro-payments are voluntary.
>
> Exactly.
>
> Napster and the rest are building up a culture of people that object to
> any form of copyright and refuse to pay for anything, EVER. I fear that
> the genie is out of the bottle and exited stage right, unfortunately it
> was the "motivation to create" genie, and damnit we needed that one!
>
> Some people will still create just because, but that guy (singular) will
> be too busy flippin burgers to create much.
>
> Didn't communism fail (first) because of this removal of rewards?
> Hmmmmm...
Napster was a prototype product of a prototype company.
It was good, so far, for two reasons:
It demonstrated indelibly that frictionless information distribution is easily
possible.
It caused everyone to examine their philosophy and methods while considering
what overhead and middlemen were really necessary. It was a wakeup call that
will cause far earlier adoption of the Internet by media companies.
It remains to be seen how the overall values of capitalism and commerce are
brought into agreement with everyone's actions. It's clear that the days of
absolute control over media are over. The culmination of vastly increasing
computer, storage, and bandwidth ability along with the open source growth
track makes it unlikely that the control genie will be put back into the
bottle.
Clearly artists will get paid, probably much more efficiently than now.
Clearly manufacturers will get paid. Programmers. Writers. etc.
Distributors and resellers will have to be clearly value added and will be
paid reasonable rates for their value add. Monopolies will mostly crumble,
although some new oligopolies will develop.
It's likely to be the hot new artists that will pave the way as soon as one
can make it without being locked into a long contract. A great idea for a
startup is a fairer-than-thou record company with Internet auditions,
delegated filtering and discussion, and extremely fair reward for the winning
artists. Only one success would be needed to rocket the company and artist
into the spotlight, leading VC/Wall St. to pulverize your door. Sounds like
fun.
The second stage is to hint to Wall St. that you are raising enough capital to
do a leveraged buyout of one of the traditional record companies (who's stock
will be depressed at this point) with awards of ownership to already-signed
artists. Then you blitz the market with $6 cd's and $3 downloads. All future
artists get 'startup scholarship' after working their way through the public
or semi-public filtering process.
The price of using this idea is a percentage! ;-)
Everyone understands that people have to be rewarded well. People think that
all of those college students don't get it, but many of them wanted to start
bands and make it rich. To some extent they don't get all of it. Perceptions
are shallow. That will change to some extent.
All of this amplifies the distinction between physical and informational
property. For a long time the trick was to convert intangible information
into tangible property. That's going to be weakened tremendously. I'm not
sure if it's completely good, but it is a more natural order.
> - Adam L. Beberg
> Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
> The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
> beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
sdw
-- Insta.com - Revolutionary E-Business Communication sdw@insta.com Stephen D. Williams Senior Consultant/Architect http://sdw.st 43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax Jan2000
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