-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [ 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBNGDdkUHx57Ag8goBAQH0TwP/ZKJMdO1klPSI0W/UWxzX3B+2sWGp2lUT JAkSrHC6ha3JAq+NECF2Cwmf8wuu+mmdyy6laFTljGJ9uuxnfrZZ4QfJAR0S0KbM 8swifaqDkryQtu3dpJOzDV8Kc7B7QYiF3HyiW0NYDHI+VwO9hgFAq/+XkQA5Yhb8 erGdU+e5cwQ= =uFfo -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --John Kelsey, Counterpane Systems, kelsey@counterpane.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36