Quote:
Originally Posted by latepaul
Something that had confused me about your proposal is starting to become clear. So just to clarify, under your scheme someone who paid for the book can give it to whoever they want but anyone who received it can't pass it on - is that correct?
Because I think it might be a bit confusing. On the one hand you're encouraging lending/sharing on the basis that that's like paper books, but you have to educate people that the lending/sharing can only go one level - unlike paper books.
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Almost right :-)
Under my scheme there is not a predefined and top-down limit on who can give a copy of a file to whom: this would be, in my view, unenforceable and not flexible enough. Instead, it's the mechanism itself that encourages those who paid for a book to give a copy of it only to people who they trust will never share it with anyone else: in fact, if they keep doing otherwise they will almost certainly get some fines on the long run. Nothing
except not wanting to put the original buyer into trouble prohibits "second-level" sharing.
According to my proposal the work of preventing illegal distribution of content is left to
distributed trust bonds between people, not to the fear of (extremely unlikely though terrible) punishment as it is today. The reward for doing such prevention is the freedom for everyone of us to do with our media all the things (or most of them) that we would like to do, and are presently prohibited, illegal or unnecessarily difficult.
BTW, thanks to you and everyone else participating in this discussion for your effort to delve into this (now more than a bit on the tl;dr side...). I find this kind of collective brainstorming very interesting and useful to refine ideas.