This seems much the same as the music industry (Well, the RIAA crowd at least) wanting to sell a product that is, by its very nature, easy to copy and transfer.
For a relatively brief period there was an opportunity to sell prerecorded music in way that was coupled to a physical medium. When cassette tapes and home recording came along there were still enough impediments (degrades sound, time involved even if you used high-speed transfers, still needing to move around a physical item) that this particular business model was still viable.
Now, however, technology is such that offering an mp3 is much like serving a Web page. You'd like to believe the end user will use this or that rendering tool in a very constrained and predictable manner, but you really have no control over it.
Rather than accept that this business model is, by the nature of the product offered, more or less doomed, some music business people felt entitled to continue it. They turn to the legal system to try to control what users can do.
They are failing, over and over, but they can't seem to grasp that their cherish business model's time has come and gone. Their sense of entitlement is too strong.
Instead, the exhort users not treat their digital files as, well, digital files. They tell them there will be no more music if people copy and share. The tell them digital restriction management is really for their own good.
Yet some people are making money from their music. The successful ones are those who understand the technology and what people will use it for, understand how, when, and where people value music, and work with it rather than fight it.
People making money from ads on their blogs may be over-estimating the true value of their sites.
There are many people who download music they can find for free, but if they were forced to pay they would do without because it just isn't all that important to them. Likewise with Web sites. I read many sites, but there are few I would pay for. If a site owner cannot find another way to monetize a site (subscriber-only, or republishing and selling collected content as a PDF), maybe it's because there's insufficient value for the readers. No one is entitled to their cherished business models.
Comments
This seems much the same as the music industry (Well, the RIAA crowd at least) wanting to sell a product that is, by its very nature, easy to copy and transfer.
For a relatively brief period there was an opportunity to sell prerecorded music in way that was coupled to a physical medium. When cassette tapes and home recording came along there were still enough impediments (degrades sound, time involved even if you used high-speed transfers, still needing to move around a physical item) that this particular business model was still viable.
Now, however, technology is such that offering an mp3 is much like serving a Web page. You'd like to believe the end user will use this or that rendering tool in a very constrained and predictable manner, but you really have no control over it.
Rather than accept that this business model is, by the nature of the product offered, more or less doomed, some music business people felt entitled to continue it. They turn to the legal system to try to control what users can do.
They are failing, over and over, but they can't seem to grasp that their cherish business model's time has come and gone. Their sense of entitlement is too strong.
Instead, the exhort users not treat their digital files as, well, digital files. They tell them there will be no more music if people copy and share. The tell them digital restriction management is really for their own good.
Yet some people are making money from their music. The successful ones are those who understand the technology and what people will use it for, understand how, when, and where people value music, and work with it rather than fight it.
People making money from ads on their blogs may be over-estimating the true value of their sites.
There are many people who download music they can find for free, but if they were forced to pay they would do without because it just isn't all that important to them. Likewise with Web sites. I read many sites, but there are few I would pay for. If a site owner cannot find another way to monetize a site (subscriber-only, or republishing and selling collected content as a PDF), maybe it's because there's insufficient value for the readers. No one is entitled to their cherished business models.