At 5:31 PM -0500 2/3/01, Elwyn Jenkins wrote:
...
>Someone ought to do/flesh out a piece describing how Bertelsmann/Napster
>is going to screw up crash and burn if it attempts to become a for-pay
>service and fails to accept AUG.
>
Well, Elwyn, I'd be glad to, but I say all the good rants have mostly
been written, at the following URLs.
First, What's Wrong With Content Protection
http://cryptome.org/jg-wwwcp.htm
is by cypherpunks cofounder (if it's possible to co-found an anarchy)
John Gilmore. John was one of the original employees of Sun
Microsystems, and did a number of other things such as co-found EFF
(which now accepts e-gold, and is still a worthy cause!) John can
turn a phrase, for example: "What is wrong is that we have invented
the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing
it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity."
Second, Courtney Love's Manifesto (first published in Salon long ago)
http://www.hole.com/speech/index.html
talks about how artists make (and don't make) money. By the way, if
any of you can help me with an artist I'd appreciate it. Anyway, if I
put both those rants together I see the gold economy smoothing out
many of the problems John and Courtney see.
>...(good points)
> . So we are talking micropayments in the range of USD 0.05 - 0.25
>for a session, or monthly payments in the range of USD 5 - 10.
>
Not just that, they're basically buying into a ______ V. Bertelsman/
Napster/et.al. lawsuit or 30, in exchange for MUCH less content in
the end. Automatic recurring monthly payments are fine for some
things, but not for internet things. If I'm off on vacation for 2 weeks
I don't want to be billed for Napster during those 2 weeks, but I'm
ok with a monthly magazine billing me (well, actually I nag them to
accept e-gold whenever they bill me, but you knew that).
>...free communities will again emerge, btw, in .org
>competition with Napster].
....
Oh, it's already happening, with Gnutella being only one of the upstarts.
Gnutella will react just as another community, the remailer operators,
reacted to a lawsuit that exposed the records of an early, easy-to-use,
anonymous email service called anon-penet.fi. When Zimmerman was
attacked for producing strong cryptography, many of us gave time and
money to the issue. Now there is tremendous (and hopefully-growing)
support for 2600 magazine's Eric Corley (AKA "Emmanuel Goldstein,"
and an *excellent* journalist IMO) in a DVD case, see
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/20010119_ny_eff_appeal_pressrel.html
for more, and if you want to help EFF then JOIN and click them some
gold, NOW! There's a lot to do, IMO. Anyway, from all these examples
and others, one could paraphrase John Gilmore's (in)famous quote re
censorship to say: "the internet treats content control as damage and
routes around it." Napster will have to "think outside the box" to take
away the advantages of services that will always remain free, and will
ultimately be technologically-unstoppable-FROM being free, IMO. The
legal profession is about to learn a very harsh clue-lesson about this,
and finally the law in question will be modified or struck down (IANAL,
but that's what I think will finally happen).
Napster should (but probably won't) admit that music is soon largely
going to be paid for with tips. The interesting thing is, if you read Love's
essay, tips might be FAR better money than even top-shelf musicians
are getting right now from the record companies. (Hopefully my buddy
Melissa Foxx will help us in this area, but it's slow going!) Musicians,
rather than giant corp.s like Seagrams, Sony, Bertelsman, etc. would
seem to be our natural allies (permission to forward this to any actual
musician you know is hereby granted!).
If enough musicians noticed us, Napster would have to notice the gold
economy. I agree that they're likely to eventually crash and burn if
they don't accept sound money at least as a choice, but it may take a
while for their shareholders to get fed up (look at Amazon). That's why
I'm such a fan of http://www.fairtunes.com/ (which will hopefully soon
notice 2cw is the best way to pay musicians). We can go right around
the major companies and appeal directly to those we can help more.
Thanks for reading. http://2cw.org/jmr gives my foundation 2cw. :)
JMR
(Still thrilled to death about the prospect of gold-chess.)
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