Doc for California Governor!
Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Complementary currencies
Stephen Hill, on the pho list, points to a great interview with Bernard Lietaer on complementary currencies (ignore the rather schmaltzy new age design; this is deep stuff about monetary theory, clearly explained).
First, let's define what a currency is, because most textbooks don't teach what money is. They only explain its functions, that is, what money does. I define money, or currency, as an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange. It's therefore not a thing, it's only an agreement—like a marriage, like a political party, like a business deal. And most of the time, it's done unconsciously. Nobody's polled about whether you want to use dollars. We're living in this money world like fish in water, taking it completely for granted.
Now the point is: there are many new agreements being made within communities as to the kind of medium of exchange they are willing to accept. As I said, in Britain, you can use frequent flier miles as currency. It's not a universal currency, it's not legal tender, but you can go to the supermarket and buy stuff. And in the United States, it's just a question of time before privately issued currencies will be used to make purchases. Even Alan Greenspan, the governor of the Federal Reserve and the official guardian of the conventional money system, says, "We will see a return of private currencies in the 21st century."
I think Heinlein once wrote that money should be an adjective, not a verb, that we should talk bout the moneyness of things.
Company Stock is in effect private currency, with a fluctuating exchange rate tracked by the Stock Market, and much of the net runs on non-monetary exchange.
Bridging these complementary currencies into the dollar economy is an interesting challenge.
First, let's define what a currency is, because most textbooks don't teach what money is. They only explain its functions, that is, what money does. I define money, or currency, as an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange. It's therefore not a thing, it's only an agreement—like a marriage, like a political party, like a business deal. And most of the time, it's done unconsciously. Nobody's polled about whether you want to use dollars. We're living in this money world like fish in water, taking it completely for granted.
Now the point is: there are many new agreements being made within communities as to the kind of medium of exchange they are willing to accept. As I said, in Britain, you can use frequent flier miles as currency. It's not a universal currency, it's not legal tender, but you can go to the supermarket and buy stuff. And in the United States, it's just a question of time before privately issued currencies will be used to make purchases. Even Alan Greenspan, the governor of the Federal Reserve and the official guardian of the conventional money system, says, "We will see a return of private currencies in the 21st century."
I think Heinlein once wrote that money should be an adjective, not a verb, that we should talk bout the moneyness of things.
Company Stock is in effect private currency, with a fluctuating exchange rate tracked by the Stock Market, and much of the net runs on non-monetary exchange.
Bridging these complementary currencies into the dollar economy is an interesting challenge.
Monday, 28 July 2003
Markets and Antimarkets
Abe Burmeister, on the Emergent democracy list, points to an interesting 1996 essay by Manuel DeLanda
called Markets and Antimarkets in the World Economy.
It reminds me a bit of my father's 1985 Two Kinds of Order paper.
Delanda talks of how bottom-up emergent meshwork markets compete with top-down hierarchic anti-markets, discusses historic exmples, and ends on this note:
Computers, in the form of embedded intelligence in the buildings that house small firms, can aid this catalytic process, allowing the firm's members to reach some measure of self-organization. Although these efforts are in their infancy, they may one day play a crucial role in adding some heterogeneity to a world-economy that's becoming increasingly homogenized.
As David Weinberger succinctly put it -'Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy'
called Markets and Antimarkets in the World Economy.
It reminds me a bit of my father's 1985 Two Kinds of Order paper.
Delanda talks of how bottom-up emergent meshwork markets compete with top-down hierarchic anti-markets, discusses historic exmples, and ends on this note:
Computers, in the form of embedded intelligence in the buildings that house small firms, can aid this catalytic process, allowing the firm's members to reach some measure of self-organization. Although these efforts are in their infancy, they may one day play a crucial role in adding some heterogeneity to a world-economy that's becoming increasingly homogenized.
As David Weinberger succinctly put it -'Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy'
Sunday, 27 July 2003
Conference attendance by proxy, continued
The hecklebot is currently winging it's way to Aspen with Joi, so I may get to heckle at Brainstorm.
Scoble's chums are suggesting autonomous robots, some of which have been built, but it's more fun to be carried around by someone really there, and pop up on the screen of the presenters to correct them.
Scoble's chums are suggesting autonomous robots, some of which have been built, but it's more fun to be carried around by someone really there, and pop up on the screen of the presenters to correct them.
Monday, 21 July 2003
Micro-content - Macro discontent?
Joi explains his interest in micro-content
It's a good summary, but it misses a key point. By emphasising the difference between commercially produced 'content' and user-created 'micro-content' he is ignoring the enormous area inbetween.
The current content publishing model is only efficient for large-runs of sales - sell under a few thousand books, a few hundred thousand CDs, or a few million cinema seats, and you won't be welcome in commercial publishing.
This gap is gradually being bridged by innovative companies, such as Cafepress and Customflix, but both of these are still creating physical goods.
I think there is a huge opportunity here to be the eBay of digital media, and I think mediAgora is the way to go about it.
It's a good summary, but it misses a key point. By emphasising the difference between commercially produced 'content' and user-created 'micro-content' he is ignoring the enormous area inbetween.
The current content publishing model is only efficient for large-runs of sales - sell under a few thousand books, a few hundred thousand CDs, or a few million cinema seats, and you won't be welcome in commercial publishing.
This gap is gradually being bridged by innovative companies, such as Cafepress and Customflix, but both of these are still creating physical goods.
I think there is a huge opportunity here to be the eBay of digital media, and I think mediAgora is the way to go about it.
Monday, 14 July 2003
Microsoft extrapolates
Jakob Nielsen explains why people hate PDF's:
For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go. [...]
Here's a quote from a customer who shunned those parts of the site that were in PDF:
"It looks like I'm going to have to go to PDF, which I'm dreading."
Scoble explains how jealous Microsoft is:
Let's see, Adobe makes money off of Acrobat. About a billion a year (Acrobat is funding an entire additional Silicon Valley skyscraper, Adobe's CEO said in a recent magazine article I read). Macromedia makes money off of Flash. Borland makes money off of tools. One of Microsoft's biggest buildings (#42) is full of guys writing tools.
The Palladium/NGSCB information locking is what Scoble is getting at here - he argues that stopping people reading things is the glorious future of profitability for the no-longer-growth-stock MSFT.
Ballmer explains what is really going on here.
A senior partner in an accounting firm needs to send email to his partners with a confidential contract proposal attached. Besides specifying who may read the proposal and that they may not copy, paste or edit the information, he specifies that the email itself cannot be forwarded. The recipients' email and word processing applications transparently enforce these policies. All partners worry less about information leaks that might damage ongoing negotiations.
Ballmer's key mistake here is assuming you can rely on computers when you don't trust people to trust you.
Why are Microsoft so obsessed with this?
I think they still bear the psychological scars from having their internal emails spread all over the papers, and are subconsciously trying to fix this with code...
Personally, I'm all in favour of anyone who thinks this way having their writings made unreadable by others.
For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go. [...]
Here's a quote from a customer who shunned those parts of the site that were in PDF:
"It looks like I'm going to have to go to PDF, which I'm dreading."
Scoble explains how jealous Microsoft is:
Let's see, Adobe makes money off of Acrobat. About a billion a year (Acrobat is funding an entire additional Silicon Valley skyscraper, Adobe's CEO said in a recent magazine article I read). Macromedia makes money off of Flash. Borland makes money off of tools. One of Microsoft's biggest buildings (#42) is full of guys writing tools.
The Palladium/NGSCB information locking is what Scoble is getting at here - he argues that stopping people reading things is the glorious future of profitability for the no-longer-growth-stock MSFT.
Ballmer explains what is really going on here.
A senior partner in an accounting firm needs to send email to his partners with a confidential contract proposal attached. Besides specifying who may read the proposal and that they may not copy, paste or edit the information, he specifies that the email itself cannot be forwarded. The recipients' email and word processing applications transparently enforce these policies. All partners worry less about information leaks that might damage ongoing negotiations.
Ballmer's key mistake here is assuming you can rely on computers when you don't trust people to trust you.
Why are Microsoft so obsessed with this?
I think they still bear the psychological scars from having their internal emails spread all over the papers, and are subconsciously trying to fix this with code...
Personally, I'm all in favour of anyone who thinks this way having their writings made unreadable by others.
Compression becoming redundant
Jem pointed me at an interesting article about the future of hard disks.
Nothing very new, (Odlyzko discussed this trend a few years back) but the implications of disk space growing with a much bigger exponent than CPU, Networking or bus speed are rather subtle.
One interesting one is that audio & video compression become pointless over time, as they clog CPUs, whereas once raw transfer speed catches up, playback can happen without the CPU involved at all.
Nothing very new, (Odlyzko discussed this trend a few years back) but the implications of disk space growing with a much bigger exponent than CPU, Networking or bus speed are rather subtle.
One interesting one is that audio & video compression become pointless over time, as they clog CPUs, whereas once raw transfer speed catches up, playback can happen without the CPU involved at all.
Wednesday, 9 July 2003
Heckling limericks
Lots of people have blogged Supernova; I was heckling in Limerick form.
The WiFi session:
The problem with wifi you see
Is coupled with coffee and tea
When you pay for your drink
It makes sense to think
That both toilets and packets are free
Kenamea session:
The biz model for Kenamea
Is hiding a simple idea
As http can fail
You should use email
And pay up to keep us in beer
New Platforms session:
The panel calls all of us users
As if were just drug abusers
They show lots of glitz
And hope that it fits
But we want people to amuse us
The WiFi session:
The problem with wifi you see
Is coupled with coffee and tea
When you pay for your drink
It makes sense to think
That both toilets and packets are free
Kenamea session:
The biz model for Kenamea
Is hiding a simple idea
As http can fail
You should use email
And pay up to keep us in beer
New Platforms session:
The panel calls all of us users
As if were just drug abusers
They show lots of glitz
And hope that it fits
But we want people to amuse us
Tuesday, 8 July 2003
Social botware
Clay Shirky and David Weinberger have been talking about rules for social software.
I've been exploring online chat again recently, via iChat and Joi's IRC channel
Points Clay and David made both come up - the room occasionally falls into Clay's three default topics, and there has been a bit of kerfuffle about rules, deflected to a wiki.
More interesting was the emergence of the room's personality as David describes. This was shaped early on by Jeannie, who joined from AIM, and became an unofficial hostess, damping down the geekiness a bit and making it feel like a place.
Victor brought in a bot in Python called 'Jibot', to join Aaron's 'datum' both of which look up information over the net. As Victor's first language is Spanish, he leaned heavily on datum's dictionary and acronym lookups.
Jibot being Open Source, various of us modified it to say silly things to each other, but as the frustration with WordNet's dictionary grew, Victor added a way to define and query words in it.
Suddenly, Jeannie started using this to tease and keep track of people, by defining them in the dictionary. I added multiple definitions and the all important 'forget' command, and the bot became a community gossip repository.
Because all the bot commands were issued in public, and people can edit entries, the bot got a wiki-like convergence going, storing persistent info about people.
Last night I added the 'herald' function - now, when people join the room the bot announces them using what has been said about them, or uses a random canned phrase if it doesn't know anything about them yet.
I think this follows both Clays rules for community forming -persistent handles, rewards for core users etc and David's encouragement of informal serendipity.
Seems to work well so far; regulars are introduced, new people want to be, and only a bit of complaining about the bot talking too much
I've been exploring online chat again recently, via iChat and Joi's IRC channel
Points Clay and David made both come up - the room occasionally falls into Clay's three default topics, and there has been a bit of kerfuffle about rules, deflected to a wiki.
More interesting was the emergence of the room's personality as David describes. This was shaped early on by Jeannie, who joined from AIM, and became an unofficial hostess, damping down the geekiness a bit and making it feel like a place.
Victor brought in a bot in Python called 'Jibot', to join Aaron's 'datum' both of which look up information over the net. As Victor's first language is Spanish, he leaned heavily on datum's dictionary and acronym lookups.
Jibot being Open Source, various of us modified it to say silly things to each other, but as the frustration with WordNet's dictionary grew, Victor added a way to define and query words in it.
Suddenly, Jeannie started using this to tease and keep track of people, by defining them in the dictionary. I added multiple definitions and the all important 'forget' command, and the bot became a community gossip repository.
Because all the bot commands were issued in public, and people can edit entries, the bot got a wiki-like convergence going, storing persistent info about people.
Last night I added the 'herald' function - now, when people join the room the bot announces them using what has been said about them, or uses a random canned phrase if it doesn't know anything about them yet.
I think this follows both Clays rules for community forming -persistent handles, rewards for core users etc and David's encouragement of informal serendipity.
Seems to work well so far; regulars are introduced, new people want to be, and only a bit of complaining about the bot talking too much
Monday, 7 July 2003
Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking
I have mainly been engaged in the ongoing copyright debate online, but last week I took part in two different public fora - one was the NPR show 'Talk of the Nation' which had a section on music downloading (I'm on at 23:40), the other was the ILAW seminar at Stanford, where they were discussing the same issue.
In each case I was both frustrated and concerned. On NPR I explained that the RIAA repreesent only a tiny minority of musicians, and many more are able to take advantage of the net, but was cut off before I could develop the point.
At ILAW I was able to make one brief point on emulation, but time ran out before I could explain the objections to the Fisher 'Nationalisation' proposals.
With the Grokster CEO, the Future of Music Coalition and the lawyers at ILAW all wanting the government to fix things for us via compulsory licensing and taxing computers and the net, I am getting concerned.
Lisa Rein did film my off-the-cuff explanations, but I feel I need to do two things - come up with sound bites for use in these occasions in the future, and explain them more fully here.
Here are my sound-bites, which I will call the 6 heresies of digital media:
DRM destroys value
The top 20 don't matter
Streaming wastes bandwidth
Live broadcasts waste time
Advertising reduces incentives
Compression wastes entropy
I'll expand on these later, as time permits.
In each case I was both frustrated and concerned. On NPR I explained that the RIAA repreesent only a tiny minority of musicians, and many more are able to take advantage of the net, but was cut off before I could develop the point.
At ILAW I was able to make one brief point on emulation, but time ran out before I could explain the objections to the Fisher 'Nationalisation' proposals.
With the Grokster CEO, the Future of Music Coalition and the lawyers at ILAW all wanting the government to fix things for us via compulsory licensing and taxing computers and the net, I am getting concerned.
Lisa Rein did film my off-the-cuff explanations, but I feel I need to do two things - come up with sound bites for use in these occasions in the future, and explain them more fully here.
Here are my sound-bites, which I will call the 6 heresies of digital media:
DRM destroys value
The top 20 don't matter
Streaming wastes bandwidth
Live broadcasts waste time
Advertising reduces incentives
Compression wastes entropy
I'll expand on these later, as time permits.
Monday, 30 June 2003
California wireless access bill 855
AB 855 (current text here) aims to streamline leasing of public lands for cellphone companies, and earmarks 15% of the revenue for 'digital divide' projects, to be disbursed by a committee.
How about simply creating a presumption in favour of granting community and non-profit 802.11 wireless projects access to public lands for their base stations and backhaul?
If Niue can have ubiquitous public wireless access, why not California?
How about simply creating a presumption in favour of granting community and non-profit 802.11 wireless projects access to public lands for their base stations and backhaul?
If Niue can have ubiquitous public wireless access, why not California?
Saturday, 28 June 2003
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
Can San Jose choose freedom?
Comcast is suing San Jose on First Amendment grounds.
SJ's quid pro quo for renewing Comcast's cable monopoly was providing public internet access for the council.
So here's a radical suggestion. Instead of handing out a monopoly, open the cable poles to anyone who wants to run wires on it. Encourage community wireless networks to be formed.
Anyone want to help lobby for this? Offer advice? sjcable@epeus.com
SJ's quid pro quo for renewing Comcast's cable monopoly was providing public internet access for the council.
So here's a radical suggestion. Instead of handing out a monopoly, open the cable poles to anyone who wants to run wires on it. Encourage community wireless networks to be formed.
Anyone want to help lobby for this? Offer advice? sjcable@epeus.com
Monday, 23 June 2003
Nationalizing music, protection rackets and freedom
Jim Griffin vehemently objected to my description of his proposals for funding music as 'nationalization'. He is working on an actuarial way to fund copyright payment via a kind of insurance. At present he has not publicly documented his ideas, and he pointed me at this article, which does give a good background, but then advocates these 'solutions':
1) A compulsory license on all media for use over computer networks
2) A tax on all computer networks and other computing storage devices
3) a statistically vague statutory metering model to distribute this money.
Calling this nationalization is not an exaggeration.
Will this compensation scheme pay me for my blog, for my posts to the pho mailing list, for my IM chats and video conferences?
People buy internet connectivity to connect to one another; transferring copyright works is incidental. This is like charging a annual car tax to pay for music listened to on the radio while driving.
Jim's suggested scheme plays into the heart of the democracy debate, because he does not trust the public. He does not believe they will voluntarily pay for music, so they must be coerced. Here's what he said:
payment for music can now truly be said to be voluntary, technically and practically if not legally. [...]
A civilized society should not -- I think cannot -- tolerate a voluntary economy in knowledge, creativity, art and speech. [...]
I am avowedly for compulsory payments for digital art assessed at the source of the digits, whether internet service provider or digital wireless provider. In the country where you get your digits, you must pay through the service provider, which worldwide is regulated by a sovereign communications agency.
Jim is a good man, and I'm sure if he were given control of disbursing the taxes on computers he would try to do it fairly and well, but I don't believe he'd get the job. I think the kind of regulatory capture we have seen before would take place, and the placemen for the big publishers who feel most threatened by a widening of the market would divert the revenues to themselves.
The iTunes music store and others like them show that people will voluntarily pay, when they perceive a fair deal. 5 million songs sold in 8 weeks to the relatively small pool of users has generated more revenue for Jim's erstwhile clients, the record labels, than 5 years of compulsory licensing from the DMCA.
This is the zeroth law of economics. Uncoerced trades create value, as both parties perceive a benefit, or they don't trade. Coerced trades destroy value.
To increase the funds for art in a sustainable way we need to come up with models that provide that perceived value.
Jim's 'insurance for copyright payment' is less like nationalization, but it is a lot like a protection racket. Pay off the RIAA and they won't use the Verizon decision to harass you with automated DMCA takedown requests?
It also is predicated on the payment for art falling to the marginal cost of distribution; effectively treating music as homogeneous and of low value; he advocates the great 'lost dream' of the celestial jukebox service.
There has been huge growth, as he concedes, in devices designed to store streams for playback. The million iPods, the success of TiVo devices, and yes, all those CD burners, are concrete counter examples that show how much people value having their own stored media, not relying on a centralized, and possibly ephemeral service.
If the iTunes store's terms were adjusted a bit, to provide a lifetime right to obtain a high-quality unencrypted copy of the work in question, rather than the right to download an encrypted one once, and back it up and burn to CD in your own time, I think it could realise even greater value, as this is what people are trying to buy when they buy CDs.
Jim's (January) post in full, reproduced with permission:
1) A compulsory license on all media for use over computer networks
2) A tax on all computer networks and other computing storage devices
3) a statistically vague statutory metering model to distribute this money.
Calling this nationalization is not an exaggeration.
Will this compensation scheme pay me for my blog, for my posts to the pho mailing list, for my IM chats and video conferences?
People buy internet connectivity to connect to one another; transferring copyright works is incidental. This is like charging a annual car tax to pay for music listened to on the radio while driving.
Jim's suggested scheme plays into the heart of the democracy debate, because he does not trust the public. He does not believe they will voluntarily pay for music, so they must be coerced. Here's what he said:
payment for music can now truly be said to be voluntary, technically and practically if not legally. [...]
A civilized society should not -- I think cannot -- tolerate a voluntary economy in knowledge, creativity, art and speech. [...]
I am avowedly for compulsory payments for digital art assessed at the source of the digits, whether internet service provider or digital wireless provider. In the country where you get your digits, you must pay through the service provider, which worldwide is regulated by a sovereign communications agency.
Jim is a good man, and I'm sure if he were given control of disbursing the taxes on computers he would try to do it fairly and well, but I don't believe he'd get the job. I think the kind of regulatory capture we have seen before would take place, and the placemen for the big publishers who feel most threatened by a widening of the market would divert the revenues to themselves.
The iTunes music store and others like them show that people will voluntarily pay, when they perceive a fair deal. 5 million songs sold in 8 weeks to the relatively small pool of users has generated more revenue for Jim's erstwhile clients, the record labels, than 5 years of compulsory licensing from the DMCA.
This is the zeroth law of economics. Uncoerced trades create value, as both parties perceive a benefit, or they don't trade. Coerced trades destroy value.
To increase the funds for art in a sustainable way we need to come up with models that provide that perceived value.
Jim's 'insurance for copyright payment' is less like nationalization, but it is a lot like a protection racket. Pay off the RIAA and they won't use the Verizon decision to harass you with automated DMCA takedown requests?
It also is predicated on the payment for art falling to the marginal cost of distribution; effectively treating music as homogeneous and of low value; he advocates the great 'lost dream' of the celestial jukebox service.
There has been huge growth, as he concedes, in devices designed to store streams for playback. The million iPods, the success of TiVo devices, and yes, all those CD burners, are concrete counter examples that show how much people value having their own stored media, not relying on a centralized, and possibly ephemeral service.
If the iTunes store's terms were adjusted a bit, to provide a lifetime right to obtain a high-quality unencrypted copy of the work in question, rather than the right to download an encrypted one once, and back it up and burn to CD in your own time, I think it could realise even greater value, as this is what people are trying to buy when they buy CDs.
Jim's (January) post in full, reproduced with permission:
At its essence, I think the current situation can be summed up as follows: Increasingly, we live in a world where payment for music (and other digital art) is voluntary.
Sure, that's always been true to some degree, but the degree is increasing with the erosion of friction. Technology is propelling us to a world of friction-free delivery of music (and books and movies and most speech and art). Indeed, it is fair to say that some are already there -- Qualcomm has a demo vehicle equipped with 2.4mbps wireless (almost two T-1 connections) -- and it is a slippery slope as the rest of us follow.
I repeat, payment for music can now truly be said to be voluntary, technically and practically if not legally. Violations are less enforceable than speeding tickets, with only large-scale violators the avowed targets of authorities. You can find anything you want with a simple software client, and that's not going to change during our lifetimes; in fact, it's going to get easier. Or worse, depending on your perspective.
A civilized society should not -- I think cannot -- tolerate a voluntary economy in knowledge, creativity, art and speech. Quite the opposite, the hallmark of civilization is advancement in the creative arts, and art is indispensable in the advancement of science.
Clearly, some differ on this point. They advocate the straight-line efficiency of free markets on the one hand, but believe morality or technology or the law or some combination will sufficiently compel us to satisfy and stimulate art, knowledge and speech with payment that is essentially by choice. This talk is about speed bumps, or keeping honest people honest, or inducing just enough friction to make a market, or virtual tip jars, suing the supernodes, whatever. Call it what you will, it is the last grasp of an argument that began with control and now pleads for just enough inconvenience or persuasion to keep people buying products or digital keys or authentication services they now know they no longer need to enjoy the art they love.
I do not believe voluntary payment for music will sufficiently spur the growth of the information economy to reward rightsholders in music, movies, books and other digital art, nor do I believe we will develop legal, technical or persuasive means to make payment more than voluntary, unless we enact a sovereign, global system of compulsory payments on digital access, whether wireless or wired.
If you are not part of finding an appropriate solution for compulsory payments then you are part of supporting a world of voluntary payment. Knowingly or not, you must either advocate a solution that collects the money needed to support a global world of audio, video, text and graphics you love, or watch them whither and die.
Supporters of rights management technologies are also unwittingly supporting a world of voluntary payments. These hypothetical, unproven so-called solutions never have and never will achieve their aims for a long list of reasons, but here I will offer only one: Digitization liberates art and knowledge that can be digitized to establish the shortest, most efficient path from source to destination, and this bionomic (www.bionomics.org) notion was designed into the internet and is an inherent feature of digitization. The cat is out of the bag; the shortest path to the music you hear in the dorm room next door will never again include the record store down the street.
As a result, I am avowedly for compulsory payments for digital art assessed at the source of the digits, whether internet service provider or digital wireless provider. In the country where you get your digits, you must pay through the service provider, which worldwide is regulated by a sovereign communications agency. The penetration rates of digital services are now sufficient in almost every country to spread the costs across many wallets such that the payments will not seriously diminish the growth and use of those services. In fact, the opposite is true, because without access to content, whether because of licensing or because its economy continues to dry up for lack of revenue, the services cannot thrive.
Finally, I now believe compulsory payment to be more important than compulsory licensing. I think we cannot live without the former, and the latter will take care of itself with a sufficient pool of money. Like performance rights, you needn't license them, needn't choose a society, but you'd be silly not to do so. Given a sufficient pool of money, there will be plenty of content, and the serious pools created by per connection payments will grow the business by multiples that will bring all major studio content by choice, and offer independents access to global markets previously restricted by practical, legal and illegal obstacles.
We today live in a world of voluntary payment for music, movies and other digital art. Technology's liberation of this content will increasingly outstrip its ability to control the content. We must either fashion and enact a global, sovereign compulsory payment system on digital access or accept an art and knowledge economy based on ever more voluntary payments and the inevitable loss of revenue. And we needn't compel rights holders to join this system; building it will draw them, and while they may not be wrong to await its creation, I believe them certainly wrong if they are not actively a part of bringing it about.
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