On 2006-08-17 19:43, Nadav Har'El wrote: > I think you are wrong. Imagine we had a "all-you-can-hear" Ipod buffet. > You pay Apple $10 (or whatever) a month, and you can download as many songs > as you want. But now you say that Apple will, or indeed must, use DRM on the > songs it gives you. But why??? Why should the copyright owners ask Apple > to "protect" the songs they give you?
Err... There are several such "all-you-can-hear" services, and AFAIK they all use DRM (for very obvious reasons). So I'm not sure I understand your question. > After all the same songs are already > available on the Internet from other sources! The studios obviously don't think so, and they're paying an army of lawyers, lobbyists and engineers to keep it this way. > Once this obvious fact dawns > on copyright owners - that no matter what DRM they use, the same music will > always be available from other "pirate" sources without DRM - they will > see the futility of DRM and stop using it. Then what will they make money from, concerts and nice packaging? In that case they'll be losing the revenue due to exclusiveness (a nicely package CD of music you can download anyway has less economical value than a nicely packaged CD of music you can't get otherwise) *and* imposing restrictions on users. The worst of both worlds. Is this what you aspire to? > By the way, think of public libraries - which unfortunately are seriously > declining in Israel (according to a recent study, 5 years ago 40% of the > families used them, today 20% of the families use them). It's more-or-less > a buffet of books - read as many books as you want. You can't actually > "keep" the book, but this is just an irrelevant detail (if you want to > reread the book you can always go back to the library and get it). Keeping the book is relevant - the fact you can't keep the book detracts from its value for a lot of people who like having their books accessible, visible and clean. But the really relevant aspect is that you couldn't easily distribute copies of the library book you've borrowed, so as long as libraries weren't too popular they didn't form a big economical threat to publishers; in fact, some publishing niches (e.g., high-price textbooks) still rely on libraries as their main clients. Also, there's a lot of historical baggage. So I don't see how the libraries analogy is relevant. And anyway, current e-Book DRM schemes *are* preventing library use. >> *That* would be a bad idea indeed. There has to be a mechanism for fair >> distribution of the collected money -- again, based on the the citizens' >> preference and consumption habits. This is obviously the hard (and >> perhaps infeasible) part of this approach. But imagine the consequences >> if we came up with a a nice, fair way to do it! > > My guess is that it will be just as fair as today's "channel 1" represents > the interests of the population :-) I believe it's a very interesting question and by no means obvious. To name one alternative, you could allow arbitrary copying and playing of music, then do random sampling of actual music consumption and divide the tax money according to that. This obviously has a lot of problems (e.g., how to do so with minimum invasiveness, what to do about derived works), but seems basically fair. I'm sure you can think up better schemes that don't follow the "channel 1" model. Eran --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
