Wei Dai wrote:
I think we should consider funding information goods (software, movies,
music, etc.) through tax revenue rather than copyrights.
... I'd like to proposed the following scheme:
Whenever someone first accesses a piece of information, he may be chosen
by the access mechanism randomly, with probability p1, to answer whether
he values that information more than some random amount of money $x. Then
with probability p2, if he answers yes, he is charged $x, otherwise he is
denied access to this piece of information forever. p1 and p2 are both
supposed to be small. In the usual case, he would just be allowed to
access the information for free.
Users in this system would be able to access almost all information for
free, and when they are asked to state their preferences they have
incentives to answer truthfully. ...
Some copy protection would still be needed, so that if someone is denied
access, he is not able to obtain the information from another channel.
However, the idea is that unlike today, the market for such piracy would
be so small that no one would have an incentive to supply pirated
information or the tools needed to break copy protection.
This would seem to work badly for socially consumed information goods,
like movies or music. If a group of us decides to watch a movie
together, one of us tries to download the movie, at which point he may
be denied. Should this unusual thing happen, another of us tries.
Only in the very unlikely circumstance that all of us are denied will we
actually have to face the possibility of paying for it. And even then
all we'll reveal is the opportunity cost of this movie, relative to a
bunch of other movies we expect to be able to download for free.
You'd need very good estimates of the size of groups that sit down to
watch the movie together to infer what you want from this data.
Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
