🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <kn6pijINN30j@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> holtz@netcord.Eng.Sun.COM (Brian Holtz) writes:
>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.  
>[ Lots of thought-provoking stuff deleted].

You're ignoring the enormous economic and political power of the media
conglomerates -- the folks that combine, in a single organization,
control of national newsmagazines, bookstore chains, movie studios,
and record companies (e.g. Time-Warner).  They won't tolerate an
erosion of their earnings, and they'll use their political power to
make sure that all those copyrights they own (to movies, books, CDs,
etc) don't become worthless.

Given this, some equivalent of the DAT tax is probably the best we're
going to get.  A pool of money will be collected somehow or other and
will go to the artists (but mostly to the companies the artists work
for).  The companies won't accept becoming the equivalents of the
musicians that play on the subway with a cup for spare change.  Even
now, they've got the US Government shaking down China because China
is taking a rather GNUist view of intellectual property rights; you
can expect trade sanctions to follow.  (That is, China doesn't want
to have to respect US patents and such, and they copy software freely).

--
Joe Buck	jbuck@ohm.berkeley.edu
"If we face a recession, we should not lay off employees; the company should
sacrifice a profit.  It's management's risk and management's responsibility.
Employees are not guilty." -- Akio Morita, chairman of Sony