pools of common patronage and micropayments by use
via Stowe Boyd:
Posner Wants To Ban Links To Save Newspapers
juicy bit:
Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary...more
Very rough analogy: Before there was central water, people dug wells and paid for delivery equipment to provde them with clean water; each habitation its own system. Centralized water eliminated the need, and well diggers and equipment providers largely disappeared. People still pay to access water, just via other means.
News organizations need to divorce what we want from the physical encasements that no longer are quite so essential (tho' the net-deprived might disagree). They and we seem to believe that the end of the need for paper is the end of the need for news. It isn't.
Similarly, we think of the necessary costs of Internet provision to consist of the cost of the pipes, the delivery mechanism. An analysis of the actual pipe costs would help us understand why it is that pipemakers are so happy to be in this business. Perhaps some of that profit could be applied to subsidize use.
Not as in giving the New York Times a basic content emolument for existing, but maybe more as in a micropayment method by which, when users choose to look at a story in the Times, a tiny sliver of funds goes to the Times. Not directly out of the pocket of the individual user, but out of a common fund, generated from the pipemakers' profits.
That is, end users fund the pipes and contribute to content costs, but content providers earn their keep by justifying their existence. Links are free and the more you are linked to, the greater the chance of getting those micropayments -- $.0000000000007 or so, nothing huge - but it will add up.
Such a means of common, shared costs of patronage might seem silly, or full of difficulties and obvious problems, but it is surely less so than invoking antiquated and misguided law to "bar linking."
Labels: access, commodification of news media, micropayments, New York Times, we shall not be content until we have monetized the services your body provides for you -- down to the excremental function
posted by Tom Matrullo at Sunday, June 28, 2009
6 Comments:
This is a tough phase we are going through right now. The world is being brought to a new common denominator in many ways. The challenge is to deliver value, intelligence, capabilities, empowerment to people, as many people as possible. While in the process we let our antiquated support structure fall away. These are scary times for many people, especially those that have been supported by antiquated institutional structures. Life is not empathetic. Reality is being born anew. Freedom and security ride a see-saw in the park every moment of every day... they better be friendly with one another, because its not fun just balancing, and its not fun being stuck at the top... it takes cooperation... collaboration... win-win decision making to ride a see-saw successfully. So although the economics of information is being thrown up in the air for a moment, and causing great turbulence in a once ordered world, the solution is not about just the news. It is not about any one thing, except that it is about how human beings are devised as entities that bring 50% of the value transaction in every exchange just by being alive, participating in the world, the market, as a consumer, buyer, user. Until we give structure to the marketplace owned by individual human beings at birth, the space between their ears will not be captured for a profit in a way that will endure into the future. I own my space between my ears... whats it worth to me?
The world is more than a market, people are more than consumers. I suspect there's something I'm not getting here.
True, the world is more than a market, people are more than consumers. The missing piece is that you exist here, now, in the market, where we are participating in defined roles that you can not escape without knowledge. The parts of us as individuals which do not belong to the market, which are not definable in neat little categories like consumers, buyers, users, etc... are not present here, now... in this market. Those parts of me do not even use the Internet. I don't know that its anything you are not getting, i think it is a realization that if we are going to be involved in life as a component in the socio-economic system, you should own your life as an asset as far as the system is organized. Subsistent living is always an option, but a dwindling one.
Your argument then is that we have no choice but to subject ourselves to the system as it now exists? Perhaps you have a link to where the actual overview and practical workings, benefits, etc. of your view are laid out in detail.
"no choice but to subject ourselves to the system as it now exists" would be a harsh perspective I believe... given the size of the human global population and the lack of practical alternatives for supporting our needs on a systems level, I think it is more utilitarian to try and move our system in the right direction than to scrap it altogether. Change is needed in so many ways, but at the first, we need to reset the relationship between the one and the institutions of the many. If we can get that in place, we will change the nature of how our systems evolve in a pervasive manner that will be much more sustainable and empowering at the same time. I am working on that link, pulling details together... i'll let you know when its ready.
Thanks - I'll look forward to it.
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