Making software … count how many times it has been invoked is easy, but making it count how many times it has been copied is much more difficult. So why not build an information-age market economy around this difference? If revenue collection were based on monitoring the use of software inside a computer, vendors could dispense with copy protection altogether. They could distribute electronic objects for free in expectation of a usage-based revenue stream.
Predictor: Cox, Brad
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Brad Cox, founder of the Coalition for Electronic Markets and a faculty member in George Mason University’s Program on Social and Organizational Learning, writes: ”Superdistribution allows miners, refiners, fabricators, assemblers, distributors, and marketers to cooperate and compete as producers and consumers of electronic goods within a global information-age society. Existing copyright law distinguishes between copyright (the right to copy or distribute) and useright (the right to ‘perform,’ or to use a copy once obtained). In the eyes of the law, when Joe Sixpack buys a record or CD at a store, he’s actually purchasing a bundle of rights … that allows use of the music on that medium only for personal enjoyment. Large television and radio companies buy an entirely different bundle of rights … Similarly, superdistribution treats each personal computer as a broadcasting station whose ‘audience’ consists of a single ‘listener.’ First pioneered in 1987 by Ryoichi Mori … superdistribution is based on the observation that electronic objects are fundamentally unable to monitor their own copying but trivially able to monitor their use. For example, making software … count how many times it has been invoked is easy, but making it count how many times it has been copied is much more difficult. So why not build an information-age market economy around this difference? If revenue collection were based on monitoring the use of software inside a computer, vendors could dispense with copy protection altogether. They could distribute electronic objects for free in expectation of a usage-based revenue stream. (This, of course, raises the same hairy privacy issues that we trade off when we choose to use credit cards instead of cash or talk by telephone rather than face to face. The real risk to privacy here does not arise when usage information is used only for billing, but from any possibility that it might be used for other purposes.) Treating ease-of-replication as an asset rather than a liability, superdistribution actively encourages free distribution of information-age goods via any distribution mechanism imaginable. It invites users to download superdistribution software from networks, to give it away to their friends, or to send it as junk mail to people they’ve never met.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Superdistribution
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/superdis_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney