March 11, 2005
Peerflix, right of resale and the one-copy-per-song town.
The Menlo Park startup Peerflix has been getting some ink the past couple days. They're like NetFlix, only instead of renting a DVD for an indefinite time you trade DVDs with other members. Peerflix has no inventory, they provide the matchmaking service, mailing labels and points system that works like barter cash, all for a 99-cent per trade fee. You own the DVD you trade for, free and clear — and legal.
It's models like this that bring home for me again why it was so important for the music distribution cartel to crush MP3.com's Beam-It service and, more directly, why they're sure to fight any possible emergence of a used digital-music market.
The Berkeman Center's white paper on iTunes has a good discussion of the Digital First Sale doctrine (starting around page 51), and concludes people probably don't have the right to resell used digital media (just the bits) like they do tangible things like books or CDs. But imagine for a moment that we did, and that things like the DMCA, draconian EULAs, and the RIAA shock troops didn't get in the way. Now imagine a frictionless Peerflix, (or better yet a Peertunes) and that it's hooked into your music player, so when you click on a song it automatically sells the song to you (locking anyone else out from playing it), plays it, and three minutes later it gets sold back to the digital lending library again. A whole town could share a single music collection; the less-popular music could be shared by a whole country. And it'd all be legal.
I can already hear all the usual clamoring from the cartel about how this sort of thing would bring down the music industry, destroy artist incentives, yadda yadda. The funny thing is, I don't think it would — those are the exact same things that copyright owners whined about when faced with the creation of the library, used bookstores and the VCR.
Posted by bug to Intellectual Property at March 11, 2005 10:34 PM | TrackBackI think that the thing that offends me most about DRM is that it attempts to turn files into "things" without any of the added benefits.
With an MP3 the argument is that since I can sell it to you and still listen to my copy, I shouldn't be able to sell it to you. If I sell you a DRMed AAC file and successfully transfer it to you, Apple can make sure that I can't listen to it any more.
They cripple the file in order to make it more like a physical thing, but then we still have to legally limit it like a copyable file. Consumers get the worst of both worlds.
Posted by: George Hotelling at March 12, 2005 5:57 AM