Owning Digital Media

Today, I was read­ing an explo­ration of solu­tions to the prob­lem of infinetly repro­ducible con­tent, and hap­pened onto an inter­est­ing paragraph.

Tycho, the author writes:

I said, a few weeks ago of the whole DRM issue, that I thought “we needed to get away from the whole ‘own­ing bits’ metaphor for con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion.” The whole DRM thing that so many of us find so oner­ous would be mostly become a non issue if we dropped the pre­tense that when you down­load a song or a book or a movie that you’re “buy­ing them.” If you’re just watch­ing the bits for a while, who cares what the dig­i­tal restric­tions are? If prices are rea­son­able for con­tent, who cares if you can only “have” a half dozen books at once? I think it would all work out. But maybe that’s just me.

This really an inter­est­ing idea, mostly because I don’t think it sup­ports his point as well has he would like.

To illus­trate, let me point out that I always have been a fan of the library sys­tem. With a library card, I have in both essence and lit­er­ally, an entire library at my disposal.

This is why I’m not crazy for own­ing books. Who cares about own­ing books and spend­ing money (that I could be spend­ing on some­thing else) on them, when I can get almost any book I want within 2 or 3 days?

How­ever, I have friends who think this is insane (sev­eral friends, actu­ally). They like own­ing books, even though they have library cards, too. This is a phe­nom­e­non I don’t under­stand and have given up try­ing to get my mind around.

The truth is, there are peo­ple who feel the same way about dig­i­tal media, about the music they down­load and (I’ve seen this lat­ter one a lot in recent years) the movies they down­load. They enjoy acquir­ing a giant (ter­abytes!) col­lec­tion of dig­i­tal movies.

Again, this seems insane to me. Not only do you not get the enjoy­ment of the phys­i­cal media, but you have to spend money on giant hard dri­ves (Moore’s law not with­stand­ing) to store infor­ma­tion that you have almost unlim­ited access to any way. I can under­stand col­lect­ing rare and obscure movies/music/etc in this way; but the major­ity of the peo­ple I know who col­lect media like this aren’t afi­ciona­dos inter­ested in rar­ity or quality–they’re hoard­ers inter­ested in quan­tity and take some sort enjoy­ment in being able to brag about their 2TB movie drive.

These peo­ple very good at downloading–they have more access to more dig­i­tal media than most peo­ple (legal or not), mean­ing they don’t have any need to hoard this media. They could very eas­ily just down­load movies on demand, just down­load the bits they want to watch and delete the local copy after they’re fin­ished watching.

But they’re not inter­ested in watch­ing bits for a lit­tle while, they’re inter­ested in stor­ing as many of those bits on their com­puter as possible.

Like book own­ers, I find these peo­ple incom­pre­hen­si­ble. This is why I don’t mind hulu–I’m happy to watch a few com­meri­cials in exchange for them stor­ing dig­i­tal media and giv­ing me easy access to it. That’s a fair trade-off.

But the truth is, these hoard­ers exist, deter­mined to make the most out of their almost infi­nite access to “the bits,” to “own” as much of it as pos­si­ble (to make this atti­tude more mind-boggling, these peo­ple are often shar­ing this media more than most, “own­ing” the data while giv­ing away as many copies as possible).

All this means that despite how appeal­ing Tycho’s argu­ment is to ME, for what are appar­ently incom­pre­hen­si­ble rea­sons, some peo­ple will always want to “own” bits regard­less of infi­nite access.

Which seems like a shame to me, because it ratch­ets up the com­plex­ity of the prob­lem he’s explor­ing solu­tions to, namely:

Cre­ators of con­tent (music, lit­er­a­ture, soft­ware) should be reim­bursed for their work, and there should be busi­ness mod­els that sup­port these kinds of pur­suits. In other words peo­ple should be com­pen­sated for the cre­ation of con­tent in a viable and sus­tain­able manner.

Find­ing the solu­tion to that prob­lem is no small thing.