I am not a fan of the MPAA, RIAA or any other big industry conglomeration trying to hold on to their existing business model of selling creative works (before you view/listen to them).
I have like many many folks participated in this system. I have bought first albums then cassettes and then CD’s (and now people buy songs online too – but I have yet to). When I make a purchase of these artists works I have bought the right to listen to them freely. People who had albums upgraded to cassette tapes (maybe) but likely for sure upgraded to CD’s. If they did this they bought the work ‘twice.’ In the digital realm it gets even stranger where if you buy a piece of music on apple i-tunes you only get to copy it three times.. from one computer to the next to the next. Then it ‘runs out’ of copies. mmmm…but didn’t buy the right to listen to it when you first bought it no mater which medium you as the owner of that music choose to listen to it in.
So far the whole frame around DRM has been device based. This means every time there is a new form that plays media – (record player, cassette deck, CD Player, MP3 on desktop, ipods and zen players….and there will be more in the future.
If DRM is to exist and not completely alienate those who are the end users of music it should be identity based. I – ME – I buy a copy of a song and I get to listen to it forever on what ever the ‘medium’ of the day is.
I would like to propose a better system that still means folks get money. Music and other digital work is completely FREE.
It is all on the web and we call all access it all. I as a listener to music only have so much time that I spend listening to music. I allocate some amount that I will contribute to the music payment pool in a month $50 – $500. Then the attention ‘given’ to each song is recorded. The money I allocate amongst all the artist/podcaster etc. is distributed between them (perhaps with me giving particularly enjoyable ones a bit more) based on my attention data stream. The artist I listen to actually get money! If I like them and listen to them over years and years they will get more money then they would if they sold me a song once. This of course needs a functioning micro-payments system it may be worth the music industries business to actually do this.
Technorati Tags: identity, attentiontrust
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