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I like the direction of your thought. However, the practical future may bring more of personal complex of intelligent browsing agents, pre-fetching info for the

I like the direction of your thought. However, the practical future may bring more of personal complex of intelligent browsing agents, pre-fetching info for the user, stripping out 'cruft' to make web useful again and ....m consumable after all. Good example is Safari Reader feature and Readability plugin for Chrome. Those are just the beginning.

williamcotton 11y ago
That only satisfies the demands of the consumer. A functioning economic system needs to also reward the supplier and at a bare minimum cover their expenses. The answers are right in front of us: just treat digital media as property and follow the same model of copyright that's been working for over 300 years. The issue has been that tracking ownership and the accounting around payments wasn't able to keep up when things went purely digital. These were tasks that were at one point fully monopolized and facilitated by government and still are to some extent with things like SoundExchange. Right now the only things worth owning are shares in the aggregators, not the actual media itself. Digital media is no longer even remotely aligned with the interests of authors. In music for example, Sony didn't directly license content to Spotify, it wanted equity in Spotify itself. Whatever deals are being signed are done without the consent nor consideration of the authors. Tidal is a service where a few artists realized they need to own equity in the aggregation service because their ownership over songs and recordings has become worthless. Intellectual property is a fantasy. It is a legal construct. The only reason we've ever had a vibrant market economy of books, music, and movies is because we set up the legal and accounting frameworks to make it possible. Whatever mess we've created over the last 20 years is really starting to show it's ugly side, especially in relation to music. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a wholesale musicians revolt when it comes to digital media. Vinyl sales are up year-over-year for coming on a decade now.
- ommunist 11y ago
  I really like your point about the vinyl. However, land property rights are also a fantasy. Its a legal construct. I mean that. How can anyone claim to"own" the land if us as a species are just 2M years old, comparing to the Earth's estimated 4000M years existence. But look at the mess we created around land property over past 2000 years! So why everyone in the West was so surprised when Russians revolted in 1917 to bring land back to those who works on it and depends from it?
  - williamcotton 11y ago
    At least in the Anglo-American world, the only world I know much of anything about, we've built our entire societies on the back of common law constructs around contracts, tort and property rights. For better or for worse, it's how we do things. The American revolution was just a logical extension to the legal structures that had been evolving in the United Kingdom for hundreds of years. I can see the appeal of throwing out the concept of property rights if you, well, own no property, which was entirely the case for the vast majority of people living in Russian in 1917. However, here in the United States, we've taken another approach, and that is to encourage ownership and participation in the legal and market structures that define our society. We want more homeowners, more intellectual property owners, and more equity owners. The more people we have benefitting from these fantasies, the more likely that these fantasies continue. I think for the intents of this discussion, we've already tried out the "communist" approach to digital media ownership on the Internet. We got to where we are right now because we've basically abandoned intellectual property. But we didn't get rid of ownership. There are plenty of profitable companies who deal in hosting, distributing and organizing digital media who don't track nor care about who owns anything. Just like with the communist experiments on the grand scale of the Soviet Union, property ownership doesn't go away entirely, it just lays in the hands of a select few to the detriment of everyone else. It's not like you could ever stroll in to Stalin's house and borrow his hat without asking. Now, if we could just get more private entities in the Western world to realize that all of their ownership stems from the fantasies of a social contract between a people and it's government, we might be able to get somewhere. Acting like the government is always the enemy is absurd. You can't have a corporation without government or some other system for managing the state of ownership... hmm, what's that technology that showed up recently related to coming to consensus on who owns what on a shared public ledger?
    - ommunist 11y ago
      Thank you for exhaustive answer. It seems you mix personal, communal and private property. In the Soviet Union there was no private property. However, it respected personal property, so was the basis for criminal law, and you could not walk in and take Stalin's hat. And there was co-operative, or communal property, which was the property form for large enterprises. Property of the state falls into this category, however with a bit different sauce. With respect to IP rights, the USSR considered that personal property and established legislation for that. Vast libraries of the USSR patents were protected that way. As you pointed out - that was grandiose experiment. And it failed. Because what people wanted is private property and the state that protects private property. But the nature of the Internet reveals basic truth - you cannot own music. Absurd things like arrested Tokyo accordionist who played The Beatles for fun will happen all the time if one impose private property on music. But you can control distribution and charge for that, owning supply chain of music - this is what Apple and Amazon do. They are not going to sue homeless singing "Yellow Submarine" on the outskirts of Chicago. But they will extort every penny from labels and indie musicians who wants to use their trade channels to reach customers.
JupiterMoon 11y ago
You mean like a RSS aggregator and reader?

williamcotton 11y ago

That only satisfies the demands of the consumer. A functioning economic system needs to also reward the supplier and at a bare minimum cover their expenses. The answers are right in front of us: just treat digital media as property and follow the same model of copyright that's been working for over 300 years. The issue has been that tracking ownership and the accounting around payments wasn't able to keep up when things went purely digital. These were tasks that were at one point fully monopolized and facilitated by government and still are to some extent with things like SoundExchange. Right now the only things worth owning are shares in the aggregators, not the actual media itself. Digital media is no longer even remotely aligned with the interests of authors. In music for example, Sony didn't directly license content to Spotify, it wanted equity in Spotify itself. Whatever deals are being signed are done without the consent nor consideration of the authors. Tidal is a service where a few artists realized they need to own equity in the aggregation service because their ownership over songs and recordings has become worthless. Intellectual property is a fantasy. It is a legal construct. The only reason we've ever had a vibrant market economy of books, music, and movies is because we set up the legal and accounting frameworks to make it possible. Whatever mess we've created over the last 20 years is really starting to show it's ugly side, especially in relation to music. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a wholesale musicians revolt when it comes to digital media. Vinyl sales are up year-over-year for coming on a decade now.

ommunist 11y ago
I really like your point about the vinyl. However, land property rights are also a fantasy. Its a legal construct. I mean that. How can anyone claim to"own" the land if us as a species are just 2M years old, comparing to the Earth's estimated 4000M years existence. But look at the mess we created around land property over past 2000 years! So why everyone in the West was so surprised when Russians revolted in 1917 to bring land back to those who works on it and depends from it?
- williamcotton 11y ago
  At least in the Anglo-American world, the only world I know much of anything about, we've built our entire societies on the back of common law constructs around contracts, tort and property rights. For better or for worse, it's how we do things. The American revolution was just a logical extension to the legal structures that had been evolving in the United Kingdom for hundreds of years. I can see the appeal of throwing out the concept of property rights if you, well, own no property, which was entirely the case for the vast majority of people living in Russian in 1917. However, here in the United States, we've taken another approach, and that is to encourage ownership and participation in the legal and market structures that define our society. We want more homeowners, more intellectual property owners, and more equity owners. The more people we have benefitting from these fantasies, the more likely that these fantasies continue. I think for the intents of this discussion, we've already tried out the "communist" approach to digital media ownership on the Internet. We got to where we are right now because we've basically abandoned intellectual property. But we didn't get rid of ownership. There are plenty of profitable companies who deal in hosting, distributing and organizing digital media who don't track nor care about who owns anything. Just like with the communist experiments on the grand scale of the Soviet Union, property ownership doesn't go away entirely, it just lays in the hands of a select few to the detriment of everyone else. It's not like you could ever stroll in to Stalin's house and borrow his hat without asking. Now, if we could just get more private entities in the Western world to realize that all of their ownership stems from the fantasies of a social contract between a people and it's government, we might be able to get somewhere. Acting like the government is always the enemy is absurd. You can't have a corporation without government or some other system for managing the state of ownership... hmm, what's that technology that showed up recently related to coming to consensus on who owns what on a shared public ledger?
  - ommunist 11y ago
    Thank you for exhaustive answer. It seems you mix personal, communal and private property. In the Soviet Union there was no private property. However, it respected personal property, so was the basis for criminal law, and you could not walk in and take Stalin's hat. And there was co-operative, or communal property, which was the property form for large enterprises. Property of the state falls into this category, however with a bit different sauce. With respect to IP rights, the USSR considered that personal property and established legislation for that. Vast libraries of the USSR patents were protected that way. As you pointed out - that was grandiose experiment. And it failed. Because what people wanted is private property and the state that protects private property. But the nature of the Internet reveals basic truth - you cannot own music. Absurd things like arrested Tokyo accordionist who played The Beatles for fun will happen all the time if one impose private property on music. But you can control distribution and charge for that, owning supply chain of music - this is what Apple and Amazon do. They are not going to sue homeless singing "Yellow Submarine" on the outskirts of Chicago. But they will extort every penny from labels and indie musicians who wants to use their trade channels to reach customers.

JupiterMoon 11y ago

You mean like a RSS aggregator and reader?