On Jan 20, 2007, at 11:55 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
the question to me is whether isps and end user borders (universities,
large enterprises, ...) will learn to embrace this as opposed to
fighting it; i.e. find a business model that embraces delivering what
the customer wants as opposed to winging and warring against it.
I believe that it will end up becoming the norm, as it's a form of
cost-shifting from content providers to NSPs and end-users - but for
it to really take off, the tension between content-providers and
their customers (i.e., crippling DRM) needs to be resolved.
There have been some experiments in U.S. universities over the last
couple of years in which private music-sharing services have been run
by the universities themselves, and the students pay a fee for access
to said music. I haven't seen any studies which provide a clue as to
whether or not these experiments have been successful (for some value
of 'successful'); my suspicion is that crippling DRM combined with a
lack of variety may have been 'features' of these systems, which is
not a good test.
OTOH, emusic.com seem to be going great guns with non-DRMed .mp3s and
a subscription model; perhaps (an official) P2P distribution might be
a logical next step for a service of this type. I think it would be
a very interesting experiment.
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Roland Dobbins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // 408.527.6376 voice
Technology is legislation.
-- Karl Schroeder
