The problem being that, in the digital marketplace, artificial scarcity is the ONLY type of scarcity that exists, because as the linked article points out, anything that exists solely as digital data is not something that anyone needs to pay any amount of money for. It's like charging people money to breathe oxygen, and then attempting to enforce it by law. It's going to fail so hard that it'll actually make Prohibition look like a raging success by comparison. You're talking about "the market," but any such market still relies on CONSUMERS. I can watch any movie or TV show that I want, and listen to all the music that I want, online for free, and while I do make an effort to pay money for the ones that I enjoy, the only reasons I have for doing so are a) my own ethics and b) RIAA threats, which I find so onerous that I'm sorely tempted to "steal" media, even when I WANT to pay for it, simply out of SPITE, which means that the RIAA is actually CREATING media theft among many would-be consumers. Once you have a system that's based on unenforceable mandates and the honor system, there is no "market" anymore, because that's what COMMUNISM relied upon to keep itself running — presumptions of good faith and oppressive threats — and that's why it FAILED.
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Date: 5/11/10 20:51 (UTC)