Hughes Markets? (finally some stimulating debate on dcsb)

[William H. Geiger III]

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In <v03110710b08a5430e2ef@[139.167.130.248]>, on 11/08/97 
   at 12:39 PM, Robert Hettinga <rah at shipwright.com> said:

>--- begin forwarded text


>X-Sender: hutchinson at click.ncri.com
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 09:28:21 -0500
>To: "R. Jason Cronk" <listmanager at orange.redmans.com>
>From: hutchinson at ncri.com (Art Hutchinson)
>Subject: Re: Hughes Markets? (finally some stimulating debate on dcsb)
>Cc: dcsb at ai.mit.edu
>Sender: bounce-dcsb at ai.mit.edu
>Precedence: bulk
>Reply-To: hutchinson at ncri.com (Art Hutchinson)

>I wrote:

>>>Whoa!  Hang on here.  Sure, watermarks will tell you who information
>>>was stolen from, but they're just a stalking horse... a weak second cousin
>>>to *persistent* content control technologies (such as IBM's Cryptolopes
>>>and Intertrust's Digiboxes).  These allow rightsholders to manage a wide
>>
>><SNIP>
>>
>>>They allow rightsholders, if they so choose, to *continue* being rights-
>>>holders in a highly networked, digital world, and in a wide range of new

>To which R. Jason Cronk replied:

>>"if they so choose"  and here is where I submit the two camps divide.

>Yep.  I couldn't agree more.  There will be at *least* two, (and probably
>more like 2000) 'camps'.  And here is where I think we diverge....

>>Sure, you can decide to try to hold on to the rights, but it is going to be
>>market suicide.  Your best bet is to sell it all off, get what you can for
>>it and do it again. In other words, a recursive auction market.

>With more sophisticated tools for rights management, the market contest
>can  move to another level, with content business models *themselves*
>vying for attention.  Recursive auctions are merely one of these models.

>They may make perfect sense for the kind of content that is going to
>decline in value over time anyway (news, for example).  Not all content
>works this way though.  Recursive auction markets are exciting because
>for the most part, they haven't been possible in 'copyright' industries
>until recently.  Its easy to say that they will be more important than
>they are today.  They will.  But to say that they are fore-ordained as
>the only way for creators to get compensated is much too narrow.

>This view would only make sense if detaching copies from usage controls
>were easy.  Today it is, and there is a common misconception that this
>will continue.  But it won't.  Cryptographers especially should
>understand this.

You can use various "tricks" to make it more complicated but the fact
remains that at some point in time you have to present the data to the
user. Once you make this step the data can be snatched and seperated from
it's controls. Wether the effort to do this is worthwhile will depend on
the value of the data. 

>The same base technology that makes it extremely
>difficult to mint one's own digital coins in someone else's currency will
>make it extremely difficult to use someone else's digital content without
>complying with their controls (including payment).  It is inconsistent to
>say that digital money can have persistent value and digital content
>cannot. Both are information.  Both based on a common faith in a 'brand':
>either the U.S. Treasury or Disney.  Same idea.

Hogwash, you are compairing apples to oranges.

The value of money is that you can use it to purchase thing with it. A
forged copy of money is worthless because if the forgery is detected you
can buy anything with it. On the other hand a movie's value is in it's
entertainment from viewing it. I can just as easily be entertained by an
"forged" copy of snow white as well as an "official" copy. The fact that
it is a copy has not dimished it's value.

- -- 
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William H. Geiger III  http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
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