[NatCh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Haven't people in the past tried music download systems whereby you could download whatever you wanted as long as you were a member, but it all stopped working as soon as your membership lapsed? That sounds a little like what you're describing (apologies if I've misunderstood you). I don't think they've been too popular with consumers - people want to "own" stuff (whatever "own" might mean with something like music).

You're close, I'm not talking about the content being free to all members, just having to be a member (of some outlet) to buy the content -- that would provide a way to indelibly link a given file to a given person (assuming that's possible), and cut them off when they went out of bounds. That way content could be priced reasonably but there's be repercussions for distribution.

Of course the obvious problem on that would be if enough people decided to distribute anyway then the content would be in the wild and couldn't be un-distributed. I think I'm looking for a way to expand the basic idea that Baen follows, but put some consequences in it for 'sharing.' I'm not in love with the idea in any case, just kicking it around.

Originally Posted by rlauzon

I had an idea some time ago about such a system.

1. All books were free (in electronic form).
2. You couldn't share books, but since anyone could get any book they wanted at any time, there was no problem with this.
3. There was no central source of eBooks. Many sources served them.
4. Every time a person downloaded a book, it would be recorded.
5. A culture tax would be imposed on everyone.
6. The money from the culture tax would be distributed to the authors who wrote the books depending on the number of people/downloads (if 1 person downloaded the same book 100 times, that would only count as 1).

So authors would be rewarded based on how many people used their works and everyone gets to read whatever they want "for free".

I see some merit in this idea, except for a couple of things that concern me.

The biggest one is that I don't want government(s) involved in the trafficking of things such as books, even second hand. Setting aside the bloat and waste that would come along with it, it will be too tempting to someone sometime to attempt to exert control over what's distributed, and that's a bad thing.

The second is that if it's a governmental agency, it's too hard to go beyond a given nation's borders, which would effectively mean that the population of whatever country or countries did this would support those that didn't. If it was a majority of support versus a minority of free-riders, that'd probably still work well enough, but if not, it would fall apart completely.

If we could figure out a way to make it some sort of internationally accepted agency then we might be getting somewhere But then we'd have the risks of having an agency that can levy taxes that doesn't answer in any way shape or form to the taxees -- what if it decided that it needed to levy 100% taxation? How would we stop it? How would it collect this "culture tax" in the first place? Income? Consumption? Property? Breathing tax?

I think the notion is worth exploring though -- if those concerns can be addressed, then we just might be onto something.