The Register features an interview with Jim Griffin, CEO of Cherry Lane Digital LLC and a key participant/instigator of
Pho, a movable feast of digital arts luminaries who contemplate the intersection of content, technology and people -
vContent - from a media perspective. Jim's take on what he sees as the inevitable democratization of content distribution is that today's copyright defenders are clinging on to existing concepts of content distribution control like Tarzan clinging to a vine while seeking out the next safe swing forward. What's the next big leap? If you believe Jim and
Harvard University Professor Terry Fisher, it's to put in effect a tariff structure on ISPs or some similar common choke point and then meter out revenues to copyright holders based on calculated usage, similar to what's done today with radio performance royalties. Professor Fisher reckons that this could boil down to as little as USD 6 a head monthly for music rights - a bit cheaper than the $20,000 it would take to fill an iPod with 99-cent songs, as Jim Griffin points out, and certainly more equitable in concept. Is royalty estimation a fair or practical system to implement for digital content? While this concept has some merit, it assumes that it's going to be easy to track usage in a way that estimates actual usage. With a multiplicity of platforms and peer-to-peer content sharing allowing increasingly localized content sharing and creation, this model has some hard limits that are difficult to overcome. But selling licenses to own an experience in a specific venue or context is not easy to do when the value of "owning" digital objects is still an ambiguous and evolving concept, so it's understandable that a levy may appeal to major interests that can leverage governmental controls easily. DRM is likely to become a strong concept not from the efforts of major publishers but from the efforts of individuals and institutions trying to penetrate markets with unique and socially defined content that's not easily forced into a "water through the pipes" tariff model.
