Re: Napster: stealing another's vs. giving away one's own

From: Murray Turoff <turoff_at_CONCENTRIC.NET>
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 21:11:49 -0400

I think Napster is a wonderful demonstration to the publishing
industry. This is the same industry that wanted to outlaw VCR's whose
impact was to bring down the price of recorded movies.

The nature of the digitization of information is that fixed information
will go down in value very quickly with age.

The greater value will be in the creation of new information. What we
are really missing on the WEB is micro financial transactions. The
ability of the creator of a piece of information to place their own
transaction price on it. Some one that wants a copy of a given song
will have a transfer made to the greater of a dime or some similar
amount. But it is a price the author sets. 80% of that money should
go to the creator and 20% to the distributor running the distribution
software which is the reverse of current pricing for music, books, etc.

If a person thinks their song is valued more than they can set a higher
price or less or nothing if they are a relatively unknown group..

If the industry does not make radical change and the financial
institutions continue to try to perpetuate their monopoly on financial
transactions (credit cards) all this will end up going off shore and be
run by outfits in little known countries.

The current economic structure is trying very hard to keep it self in
place and it could be a few more decades but ultimately market economics
will win out and overcome any artificial barriers to this happening.

I have seen a number of Ph.D. students create CD's of out of print
classic books that they are suppose to be reading for an indepth
understanding. This is just another example of the same consequence.
Now they are trading CD's of such items among their community. I expect
DOVER to start issuing CD's of out of print books that the copyright has
expired on to go beyond their paper library. If they don't someone
else will and replace their wonderful service.
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT