Re: Netflix HTML5 player in IE 11 on Windows 8.1

On Jul 9, 2013, at 10:58 , Duncan Bayne <dhgbayne@fastmail.fm> wrote:

> It's not a problem! For the vast majority of cases, essentially free reproduction and dissemination of data is a fantastic boon to humanity.
> 
> The issue is that there is one particular business model that is broken by this revolution. A valid and moral goal - payment for creative works - can no longer be achieved by relying on media scarcity. 

It's not scarcity that was the helper before;  people who want to sell their content don't want it scarce.  It was that the means of production were mostly out of reach.  It was hard to press your own LPs, and copying a tape was at best tedious and unlikely to be done in bulk.  Copying a file to a server is dead easy, in contrast.

> Instead of accepting this and finding a new business model, some companies are trying to turn back the economic clock with an artificial scarcity generator: DRM. 

It's not a scarcity-generator, it's a 'copy friction' add-on.

There is lots of exploration of new business models as well;  it's not either-or.  

Here, for example, is one that's odd but might work.  

You sell your work *with permission to make copies and sell them*.  You are, in a sense, in competition with your own customers.  As a result, the first copy you sell has a very high price (maybe 50% of what you hope to make over its lifetime). After that first sale, you have a competitor, so you drop the price.  You both sell again, and now there are four providers, so the price drops more.  Eventually it hits the point where the price is low enough people will pay it even if they don't want or intend to sell copies themselves, and sometime after that the price becomes negligible.  You want to be an 'early adopter'?  You pay more.

A more common model is to set the price low enough that customers are willing to pay for an assured correct copy with the ancillary material and being honest.  I would say that to a large extent this is where music is today.  At the moment, this doesn't seem to work for movie-makers.

Another model is the use of forensic water-marking, as we have explored.  Unfortunately the costs of marking and pursuit are not often within reach.

Given the general unhappiness with DRM, someone who comes up with a viable better model will likely get a lot of interest.


David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2013 10:18:20 UTC