A few months ago, I kind of enskied the whole digital music revolution in this blog post. I almost literally have access to the world’s music on my Windows Phone and Surface via Xbox Music. There is something pretty amazing about that and the rapidity with which it has happened; and I’m pretty unhappy that I don’t have the same experience for movies.
The problem though is that I don’t own any of this content. For the most part I am renting it. I rent Hulu, I rent Netflix, I rent Xbox Music, I rent Spotify. I rent Kindle books. Even as I write it, I feel a huge sense of being let down. You see one of the reasons I became a reader was because of a decent physical library that fueled the discovery of many kinds of literary genres, in my house. The fact that it was initially pre-selected for me by an authority figure (my dad mostly) helped ease me into it pretty well.
I have no idea given the current renting regime, how to bequeath the stuff I love to my offspring. How to annotate it, dog-ear it and then preserve it for such a time when their maturity and interests make them susceptible to a gentle nudge from me to “enjoy!”. But forget offspring for a second; it’s actually pretty disconcerting that the only way you can share some digital music or movie you love with a friend is to virtually force them to sign up for a service they might not even know about – and whether it’s free* or not is beside the point.
I’m a bit of a digital survivalist – I run my own web server, email server and have been known to scoff about ‘cloud services’. It’s not that I don’t think the cloud is useful, it’s that I think it’s far cooler to have your own cloud that you have complete control over than to trust in the goodwill of Amazon, Google and their ilk. Yes, I am the proud owner of the domain ‘mecloud.net’ as well 🙂 This strategy is not foolproof in the age of NSA surveillance, but I feel a bit of comfort that to get access to my email, law enforcement would literally have to deliver the warrant to my front door.
The point being that my adoption of these content rental services is not full throated because of my inability to own outright. I’m cautious. Some would say tentative – as a cat trying to figure out if the white stuff in its saucer is cream or maybe just chalk water. Now I don’t know if I’m typical, but if I am in the remotest way, then this industry is being held back in some way by the lack of ‘ownership’ features. Or maybe the inverse; there may be more value to be unlocked by offering decent ownership and related features.
BTW, I’m not trying to be a Luddite. I am a digital progressive and I of all people understand the new world we live in and know the futility of unwinding the clock. To produce decent ownership features, one just needs to understand the lifecycle of ownership and what the main ‘verbs’ are and then innovate. Here is an example scheme that might work:
- Create an ecosystem that lets people give irrevocable rights to content to someone else – Bequeathing.
- This system should allow annotation of the content – Writing in the margins, dog-earing
Technologically, it could look like the following:
- Create an interoperable ownership standard that covers all content – music, video, books, and hybrid content types. This standard encodes metadata only – XML can probably express this pretty well. Interoperable because it needs to work across publishers as well as storefront purveyors like Amazon, Xbox Music, etc.
- Each content renting app should allow specific content to be saved in this format. Maybe for a fee or as part of a promotion or specific incentive.
- Apps can be made that will allow you to take this format and annotate it personally or collaboratively.
- The format will encode your rights into it for each piece of content.
- Anyone who you give a file that contains this format will now have the right to the content within it permanently.
- An escrow system can be used to make sure that you don’t have access to the content once you exchange or bequeath it. Or you need to pay for it again once it been activated by someone else. This escrow system could also be used to store a key a customer can use to protect their right to bequeath content.
What do you think? Do you care that you rent and not own digital content? Take this survey and tell me what you think!
*Nothing is free. Nothing. The cost might be hidden from you but still.
2 Responses
I understand you perspective. However I think this is a temporary state. My view on digital content is that, the future state is all digital content from all time being available all the time on any device. From extremely rare 18th century recordings entombed in the library of congress, to all television and recorded music of the last hundred years. And in this state, renting versus owning will blur and even when renting how much is for the pipe/infrastructure and how much is for the digital content. The unit cost of an additional copy of digital content is essentially zero.
“Information wants to be free”
BTW – are you planning to see the fifth estate? I will be interested to know your opinion when you do.
Really good point about the plenteous future awaiting us, but I think my point is different – what business model is mated to it and what is the impact on our previous quaint custom of ‘owning things’ and ‘passing it on’.
First, the assumption is that everyone will be able to afford a unit of content. But I don’t think this is the issue and how these things work really. Very few firms give you the option of buying a unit of content. They ask you to afford the subscription costs of the entire library; in other words, to be able to pay rent on an ongoing basis.
Secondly this is not progressive,This is a taller order than the fractional cost of a piece of content and some section of the market will always not be able to afford it. As such, piracy or legal ownership transfer will be their only option. its a very first world thing to think about fractional costs going to zero, but in other parts of the world, these costs are hardly fractional. If it persists you will see a digital asset rich and poor divide get increasingly starker.
Thirdly, the position that the world you advocate puts us in in is basically the wet dream of the content industry – multiple payments for the same content by everyone in a family, essentially everyone who can afford it. This does change the reality you grew up in, which is the passing on of your stuff if you lost interest in it, a secondary market of content that actually makes the market bigger and more efficient.
I can’t pretend to understand all the economics of this but I want to question the headlong direction we’re definitely headed in 🙂