[Taylor514ce]

Any economic model involving digital content must be able to assume that copying cannot be controlled, distribution cannot be controlled, and that there might as well be a billion copies floating around. I don't have the answer, but any attempt to constrain, limit, or ignore the above is doomed.

I know in my case, I don't give away content I've paid for, even if it's easy to do. There is still the "I paid for this, go get your own" mentality. I think it's more realistic to assume this attitude on the part of the consumer than the "if they can give it away, they will" attitude implied by DRM systems.

I'm still thinking about a system where the content points to a site, and the site itself generates the revenue through advertising and sponsorship. Thus the content acts as an advertisement for the site, in effect. In that model, the more copies of the content there are, the better. It doesn't fight the ease of distributing digital content, it embraces it. People would go to the site for more content, for social networking with the content author and other fans... and all of this traffic is monetized and part of the profits go back to the authors.

The TOR site is almost there, it's a swing and a miss, but intriguing nonetheless.