🚀 go-pugleaf

[I posted this to rec.arts.sf.written the other day during a discussion
on the future of hardcopy books.]

It's really quite simple: after a few more decades, when America is
wired fiber-optically and all your living room data processing is
integrated, it's just going to be hard to make money selling data on
physical media.

Books, music, movies, art reprints, periodicals -- if it's data, it's
going to be instantaneously copiable and distributable.  The only ways
to stop it will be:

1. Prior restraint against owning the hardware that _could_ be used
   for committing intellectual theft.
2. Prior restraint against buying blank recording media, by taxing its
   purchase and distributing the proceeds to data authors according to
   their share of the legitimate data market.  (Isn't something like
   this in place for DAT?  How do they decide who gets how much?)
3. Routine monitoring of nearly all households' data I/O coupled with
   automated funds transfer to the creator whose data you are receiving.
4. Random raids on households to search for unlicensed data, coupled
   with severe penalties to create a deterrent.

No free society could long stomach any of these ghastly policies.

The only way to make money selling data will be to offer it at
near-shareware prices.  If the fee that the author charges for copying
it directly from him gets anywhere above nominal, then his data
inevitably will be pirated.  What will happen is that an
efficient system will be set up to make it almost effortless for
people to electronically flip a coin or two into the author's hat each
time they feel they've benefited from the author's data.

It will be interesting to see what kind of works the coming
circumstances will promote or discourage.  Entertainment will no
longer be produced on the basis of its simple mass appeal, since no
one will watch the ads inserted into linear data.  (When your
advertisement-detecting software actually slips up and lets an ad
through, you'll just utter a command, the ad will be skipped, and the
system will try to learn not to be fooled that way again.  Initially,
there will be a technically interesting struggle between the
ad-creators and the authors of the ad-detectors, but the ad-creators
cannot win, because the consumer isn't on their side.)  Instead,
entertainment will be produced on the basis of its mass appeal to
people likely to honor their obligation to "tip" those who entertain
them.

A possible exception will be highly perishable data.  For example,
even a small "tape delay" (i.e., piracy delay) of a live sporting
event could dramatically lower its appeal.  But even news and market
quotes are fresh when they are piracy-delayed, so I'm not sure how
much of a premium one could charge for delivering them live.  However,
piracy of perishable data is the easiest kind of piracy to police,
e.g., using "sting" operations.

In the same vein, recorded pop music will become mainly a way to drum
up attendance at one's concert dates.  There won't be as much money
anymore in the "record" business, because I don't think the typical
pop-music lover will feel much obligation to further enrich a music
mega-star.  Of course, parents may have to prevent their swooning
teeny-boppers from sending all their allowance to New Kids On The
Block.

Splitting shareware proceeds among collaborators will be a thorny
problem.  For example, movies will be hard to produce if their likely
audience tends to "tip" directly to their box office idol instead of
to the movie's general account.

Only (significant) software will not be piratable.  At first this
seems contradictory, because software is data -- data with a
difference.  The difference is that software is _instructions_.  The
instructions are only useful when they are executed.  If the author of
a program chooses, she can have the program require that a temporary
license has been secured over the network before it will agree to do
anything useful.  Simple programs will be sold like data, either
because their authors choose not to use run-time licensing, or because
they will not try too hard to fool disassemblers that try to tease out
the useful logic from the licensing logic.  But authors of
more-significant systems will ensure that it is uneconomical to try to
engineer the licensing logic out of the programs they distribute.


Let's get the ball rolling.  I know you can't easily send me money --
it would probably take you two or three minutes.  But in ten or twenty
seconds you _can_ e-mail me, so here's an experiment: pretend it's a
few decades from now under the circumstances that I've described, and
you've read this article in an electronic forum devoted to newspaper-
or magazine- style articles by authors whose income derives from
direct reader tipping.  E-mail me and tell me how much you would be
willing to compensate me for whatever value you found in this article,
if you could trivially do so.  (Zero is an acceptable answer, of
course -- unless you say zero because in our thought experiment the
future-you would already know the things this article tells you.  ;)
I will summarize the responses.
--
Brian Holtz