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Originally Posted by axel77
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As you can see on the quadrant our current economic system does differently well on different quadrants. It works best on normal goods, okay on club goods, public goods are usually troublesome (well everbody knows how ineffective and cost ineffecient public services can be...) and worst on consumable non-exclusive ware (its so bad we havent got any).
Now the whole Idea of DRM is to move or keep the text industry in another quadrant as it would normally fall under without "exclusion technologies".
With eBooks they try to either make them consumable products, by strictly convining them to single device with DRMs, and when the device is broken your copy is gone also. Understandable they try it, but this just doesn't go well with people. I personally wouldn't want such a deal.
Now when you say the "jini is so far out of the bottle", we cant impossible have any working exclusion technology, then it will fall under the public quadrant. That is the only way that remotly works we know we can produce in this quadrant is by public funding. That is an author gets paid if some goverment instution decides he is worth it. Thats by the way how authorship worked in the communistic states... I mean to say it didn't work at all would not be true, but it didn't remotly work as well as the system we had so far. It would likely make the books into the same quality category as public (goverment paid) TV. Which is quite horrible in most countries, but germany tops it all 
Now what we still could and IMHO should hope for is that we succeed to make texts "club goods". The electronic library would be such a thing. Or generally you pay once for the text, and can use it as often you want. Or you pay generally a subscription fee for a given publisher... Or a given author. That way many scientific journals work. Not because hardly anybody ever buys it, but many scientific institutions have standing subscription to the publisher. Thats is not only quite well for a reader, who only pays a subscription fee for "all you can read", its also a dream scenario for publishers and authors, who know in advance a new title will get its targets. Only if a publisher/author gets worse over a given time, you will kill your subscription at some point.... |
I'd like to redescribe the I.P. goods description. By law (and custom) they start out in the "normal goods" quadrant and the eventually slide into the "public goods" category. How long they stay in the "normal goods" category had been determined by law, because economics made it too expensive to convert it into "public goods" against the will of the law. Technology has now lowered that barrier, causing a near-immediate drop of I.P. from "normal goods" to "public goods". This is causing a major disruption of the "normal goods" production model.