Making Money in Digital Money

[zem]

> Why would Bob be unable to strip off all signatures, process the sound
> file to whiten off any watermarking and re-sell it without authentication
> signatures under another nym with it's own reputation?  
> 
> What would stop Bob from turning the sound file into a plain .ogg or .mp3
> with no signatures and reselling millions of copies for 1/1000th the cost,
> or even for free.  Or have Bob be the front of a pool of purchasers who
> couldn't pay Alice her fees on their own, so they each chip in 1/100th of
> the cost?
> 
> Why would Bob's "clients" care if the cost was low enough, or just
> casually traded?

Spam.

The reason clients pay Alice or Bob to receive their approval ratings is
to avoid downloading bogus files - incomplete, poorly encoded, misnamed,
or deliberately spoofed files (cf Madonna's "what the fuck?" example).

Bandwidth isn't free.  Time and effort isn't free.  If it's cheaper for
someone to pay Alice the Editor to tell them which files meet a
particular standard, rather than spend their own time and bandwidth
downloading and listening to half a dozen potential copies, then Alice
makes a profit.

People aren't paying Alice for the content - they can get that anywhere.
 They're paying for Alice's opinions.  The reason Alice's opinions are
worth something is that they are backed by Alice's reputation.  That's
why Bob can't merely strip off Alice's signature, resign and
redistribute: the thing he is redistributing is no longer backed by
Alice's reputation, it's backed by Bob's reputation.  It's no longer
Alice's opinion, it's Bob's.

Process is the same for other domains, not just mp3 sharing.  Think
anti-spam services, search engines.  People aren't paying to receive
more content - they're paying to receive _less_.  

There's a good reason why Google is able to resell its opinions to other
search engines, even though those opinions are effectively freely
available from other sources.


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