[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

There's nothing to prevent tighter security over the web. Yes, it can happen in the U.S.

Not without destroying modern business practices.

It will only take the decision of the government, and hardware/software makers, to make it so.

Bittorrent was invented by a "software maker." The "software makers" aren't a cohesive, pro-government anti-piracy group that are going to blithely agree to cripple all internet activities in order to reinforce artificial scarcity.

The government could, with a lot of cost and effort, stamp down on a lot of filesharing--with the side-effect of making a lot of businesses slow to a crawl. However, piracy won't be stopped nor even much slowed--the same practices that were used to exchanged files before the WWW took over would come back with a vengeance. Plus new methods that weren't possible fifteen years ago, when data carriers weren't so compact.

And if things continue to tend toward the anarchy that exists today, I expect that eventually, the government and corporations will say, "enough is enough," and enact tighter controls and enforcement.

Copying doesn't get harder. EVER. It never has, in the history of humankind. Copying will not be harder in 10 years than it is now.

Digital piracy is never going to be "stopped". It could be mitigated--reduced to a level of nuisance rather than threat to livelihoods ("kids stealing chewing gum, not the Barbary Pirates," as Baen says)--but not by pretending that any corporate or government maneuver will make copying more difficult. They'll need to find something to sell as copies become cheap enough that "I have a copy and you want one" is not sufficiently compelling to get someone to hand over cash.

Sell high-quality authorized version. Sell digitally-signed editions. Sell combo packs: buy the authorized ebook & get a coupon good for 20% off the pback. Sell sociality: buy the ebook; get access to a forum with author chats. Sell convenience: have an awesome website that people want to spend time at, and keep your customers from looking elsewhere when they buy.

But "sell access to these words" is not going to be a long-term success plan. Publishers are fighting to deny this, because they were never aware how much the used book market supported them; they never understood that reading was often entirely disassociated from payments--and even more often disassociated from publisher-and-author payments. They're not going to be able to convince people that "you should read our book!" means "you should buy our book!"--it never has before.

Neither is "sell access to these pictures and sounds." While the secondhand market for songs and movies was never as robust as books, it was there--and access to the entertainment was never entirely based on ability to pay. (I don't mean "stealing into movie houses." I mean watching the VCR tape at a friend's house, or going to a bar to listen to other people play songs in the jukebox.)

The idea that every reader is a royalty-paying buyer has never been true, and attempts to make it that way will fail. Incompetent attempts will make for entertaining corporate flailings; more competent and severe attempts will result in a larger digital underground--and an internet that no longer serves as the backbone of US business and casual entertainment.