Re: Copyright commerce and the street musician protocol

["John Kelsey" <kelsey@plnet.net>]

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[ To: cypherpunks, Perry's Crypto List ## Date: 11/03/97 ##
  Subject: Re: Copyright commerce and the street musician protocol ]

>Subject: Re: Copyright commerce and the street musician protocol
>From: Marc Horowitz <marc@cygnus.com>
>Date: 03 Nov 1997 16:03:34 -0500

>Someone recently told me that game manufacturers have
>stopped worrying about piracy.  Why?  Because most new games
>come on CD-ROM, and copying a CD-ROM is an expensive,
>time-consuming operation.  Bulk duplication of CD's is
>substantially cheaper than one-off duplication, and since
>games are cheap, people will usually buy them rather than
>copy them.

This is a nice situation for CD-ROM-based video games.
However, it's probably a temporary situation.  Currently,
downloading a novel, even over modem lines, isn't all that
time-consuming.  If available bandwidth and storage capacity
keeps getting cheaper, the same will soon be true for
digital audio, and later, for digital video.  The number of
bits required to hold a twenty-minute piece of music at CD
quality isn't going to increase over time.

>While the cost of one-off CD duplication will certainly
>drop, I see no reason that media will not change form in the
>future.  As long as it's cheaper or more convenient to buy
>digital media from the publisher than to copy it yourself,
>the piracy problem basically doesn't exist.

Separate the medium from the information.  For computer
programs, it's possible to just keep bloating the data to
keep piracy from paying.  (To some extent, anyway.)  For
novels, music, and video, that's not going to work. The unit
of music I'm interested in listening to will probably not
change much.

>This is exactly
>what makes copyright work for books: I can duplicate a book,
>but it will cost more than buying it legitimately.  (There
>is still the problem of systematic large-scale piracy, but
>this is relatively easy to notice and prosecute under
>existing law.)

But once someone has scanned in the text from the book, it
costs approximately nothing to make another copy.  This
works as well for digitized music, video, and images.  Once
the data is available somewhere in digital form, it's almost
free to copy.  In a world with jurisdiction-shopping,
eternity servers, high-quality anonymous e-mail, anonymous
payment mechanisms, and cheap, high-bandwidth connections,
that digital data has to get onto the net *once*, and it is
free forever to anyon who will take the trouble to find it.

For books, one reason this doesn't happen more often now is
that the display technology for most computers is not nearly
as easy to read as even cheaply-printed paperbacks.  This is
sure to change with time.  Widespread use of DVDs will get
rid of the advantages of CDs and cassettes for listening to
music.

>Short works (newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.) will
>need a different mechanism, such as advertising, but that
>infrastructure is creating itself today.

It's essentially the same problem for text works.  A text
work you can't fit on one CD with compression is unlikely to
be something you can get many people to read all the way
through.  (The exception is reference material, where you
want *everything* of interest to be there, even though you
will surely read only a tiny fraction of the material.)

The real distinction here is timeliness.  If some
information is only valuable when it's timely, then it's
probably going to make sense to get the information from its
source, even if it costs money or you have to look at some
ads.  If the information is valuable weeks later, then it
may be hard to charge much money for access to it.

>		Marc

   --John Kelsey, Counterpane Systems, kelsey@counterpane.com
 PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36

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   --John Kelsey, Counterpane Systems, kelsey@counterpane.com
 PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36