Here’s an idea:

Instead of using law to band-aid a monetizing model that doesn’t work in the digital world, we need to make a new model. We need a way to monetize content that doesn’t treat digital content like physical goods.

Instead of punishing content pirating by threat of law, we need to eliminate the entire concept of pirating.

Here’s how the physical-goods model works:

I go to the record store and I buy a record for $15. This is a physical thing. I cannot reproduce it with the click of a button for free. If I want to give the record to a friend, I have to physically hand it to him, and that means I cannot access it at the same time that he has it. Thus, the $15 I payed for the record has payed for only one record and no more.

Enter the digital era which ruins this model:

I buy an album online for $15. Because technology is great, I can reproduce the content with the click of a button, and for free. Then I can give it to my friend and we can both listen to it at the same time, independent of one another. Initially, the content was paid for with $15, but now that there are 2 copies, it was as though I paid only $7.50 for the content. For each subsequent copy, the payment for the content goes down until the content creator is left with almost nothing.

How do we fix it?

Trying to stop pirating is not the answer. We need a new model. We need a model where the money brought in by the sale of the content is not reduced for each copy shared, but rather increased. We need a model where the goal of the content producer should be to distribute their work as widely as possible and as easily as possible. If we can figure out a way to do this, it means people can get the content more easily, and the content producer profits when good work spreads far and wide as easily as possible.

How do we do it?

I don’t claim to have the best answer to this question, but the point of this post is to get us all thinking. We’ve been approaching the problem from the wrong angle, as shown above. I’ve done a little bit of brainstorming for a new model, and sure it would be hard to implement, but in the end, it is perfectly possible with today’s technology. I’m hoping this will inspire you guys to try to come up with new models too so that we find one that’s easy to implement and works well. I’ve got two off-the-cuff suggestions for a new model.

Ads: I know, I cringe a bit at this one to. The idea of seeing an ad at the 10th page turn of my ebooks is a bit upsetting, but it could work. Given the right software reader or player, each ebook or song could have a plug at the beginning or end (or both) which asks the player to grab the latest text/graphic/audio ad from the web. So a song could be distributed freely, and the advertisers would pay the content producer to advertise to the listeners. This would be great for advertisers too because it would be very easy to target ads based on book and music genre (or even individual songs, authors, artists, or books). The further the book or song is distributed, the more people are viewing or listening to the ads, and the more the advertisers will pay to advertise with a certain book or song (or artist/album/label/etc.). This would work with ebooks, movies, and games, and software. Just build the software to serve ads to the reader, watcher, or player, and then the revenue stream will build as the digital good is distributed further to more people. Distributed computing: Did you know that people pay good money to access massive amounts of computational power? Renting processing power is much more affordable to those that need it than purchasing their own super-computer. Distributed-computing (or clustered computing) programs link together thousands of consumer-grade computers to create a super-computer-like system that can be as powerful, if not more so, than the world’s fastest super-computers. Distributed-computing applications already exist; Folding@Home and SETI@Home are just two examples off the top of my head. Content creators could create content that, while being viewed, links the user’s computer into the cluster. The resulting system would have the power of a super-computer or beyond, and the computing time could be rented out by those that need it. This means that as the content gets distributed to more and more people, the resulting revenue increases. So let’s say someone decides to watch a movie. They download it for free, and it has a unique ID which the software player uses to make the user’s computer available to the computer-cluster that belongs to whoever’s ID it is (major music labels might each own a computer-cluster, and all content published through them will add user’s computers to the computer-cluster when that content is being played/viewed). The same thing would happen when a user listened to a song or read an ebook. In addition to selling/renting computational power, these computer-clusters could be used by the labels (or whoever owns them) to mine for Bitcoins and do other revenue-producing work.

My favorite thing about any distributed revenue model (where more distribution = more money for the content creators) is that it encourages content creators/hosts to make the content as easy as possible for the consumer to get to and as easy as possible to share with friends. Instead of locking down content with DRM, content would be encouraged to be shared, hosts would offer the highest download speeds at the best quality possible because they want to get the content into the user’s hands. The content creator would want to make it super easy for people to share; all of this is great for consumers.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve got for now. There’s probably a lot of situations that I haven’t considered, but again my point here is that we don’t need to stop pirating we need to make pirating stop existing by making a distributive profit model where revenue grows as digital distribution increases.

I would love critiques, feedback, suggestions, and questions!