On Tue, 1 Feb 1994, Jason Zions wrote:
Surprise. Within ten years, the entire concept of intellectual property will be radically altered, if not completely gone. The whole thing will become so completely unenforceable that something will give; I'm not sure what, but something.
Here's my slant on it: Without government coercion, "intellectual property" is limited to its only natural form -- a secret. If you don't want everyone to have certain information, don't tell anyone. At the very least, don't tell anyone who has no incentive to keep the information to himself.
At the Austin Crypto Conference, John Perry Barlow was asked what he thought would happen to copyright. As I recall, he said something along the lines of this: that compensation for intellectual property would cease to be a thing of law and become a thing of interpersonal relationships. That people would pay the producers of stuff they liked as an incentive for them to produce more. That the ability of the Internet and its services to make widely-separated people into a community, with all the emotions and duties humans tend to experience in communities, would ensure a kind of darwinism amongst the "stuff" out there; the stuff people liked would get supported out of that sense of community, and the stuff people didn't like would not.
EFF Co-Founder Solves Prisoner's Dilemma Game Theorists Had Neglected "Community Spirit," Says Barlow
Shareware is the future of just about all intellectual property.
Maybe. I wouldn't expect to get rich on it, though...
There are only a few ways the studios could get huge bucks:
[most of list deleted]
4) Serializing digital copies to track down the "leaker". All you need is two copies from different sources to find steganographically-hidden bits or to produce a combination of the two that has a unique fingerprint that doesn't match anything already shipping.
Is this really a settled issue? I'll bet I could devise a scheme for tagging a large number of copies of an image, such that the information available to a cheater from two images isn't enough to produce an untraceable copy. Such a scheme would entail some image degradation -- if you didn't mess with some visible bits in each picture, a cheater would only have to randomize all the "invisible" bits. But of course this stuff is only useful if the work is distributed non-anonymously in the first place. It doesn't do QVC/Paramount much good to know that an2538295 was the one responsible for redistributing 10,000 copies of Star Trek L. Computer software and other interactive works should fare better, since the publishers can restrict their distribution to secure machines on a network. Customers would pay to use the software, but never receive a copy of their own. Reverse-engineering even "Dragon's Lair"-type games would be non-trivial and error-prone. And after getting ripped off for a bad interactive copy, most people would probably be happy to pay a premium for the real thing. Joe