Professor Mark J. Perry's Blog for Economics and Finance
All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.
Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University near Washington, D.C. In addition, he holds an MBA degree in finance from the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. In addition to a faculty appointment at the University of Michigan-Flint, Perry is also a visiting scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
3 Comments:
"College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere'...
Hmmm, free market forces at work here?
Thanks to Doug Ross I found this bit of info regarding the net:
Google engineers Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj write: We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!...
Sniffing out the Pirate Bay's (83.140.176.146) real source becomes an interesting proposition...
It's generally a given that the networked design of the internet "treats censorship as noise and routes around it".
Now, what, really, is censorship?
Allow me to offer a description:
"Censorship is someone telling you that 'This we deem dangerous, therefore you may not access it'"
Sounds reasonable, correct?
Now allow me to describe modern copyright restrictions:
"Copyright is someone telling you that 'This you have not paid for, therefore, you may not access it'"
Now, in terms of functionality, the two activities about about precisely the same thing -- denying access to something.
Ergo -- The internet treats copyright as noise, and routes around it.
Mind you, I'm not suggesting that copyright is immoral or wrong -- only that the process it exists for "To promote the sciences and the arts" -- generally by rewarding creators -- can no longer be performed by granting access control over said materials.
It's not going to work and the reason why is inherent in the very design of the internet -- Further, if you attempt to change the net to allow access control, and you will be opening it up (even if you succeeded, which is hopefully unlikely) the door to censorship as well.
The system requires massive revision. Rewards must be inherent with registering something, not by telling people they can't access it until they pay. I'd suggest they should also be tied to the amount of interest in the creation, as well -- presumably by some form of metric like Google hits or something. Funding, perhaps for the time being by some variety of blank media tax, but perhaps it can be done via an agreed-upon nation-level "tax", too (i.e., china pays 'x' dollars per head, etc.)
It's gotta be fixed, because it's not going to work, and the current system isn't suited to an IP and services economy, anyway. An IP&S Economy works by the flow and transformation of information. Access control inhibits and hinders the flow, and acts as a brake on the system.
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