Our Healthy Exchange of Views continues, with Jim following Adam...

Jim Delong:

I think Stan is raising an important point, the difference between parastic technologies and complementary ones. He opines that it might be possible to eliminate the parastic characteristics, but it is pretty tentative.

I find your newpaper analogy proves his point. If you tell your maid to download the paper to disk, cut out the ads, and send it out over the Internet (with click ads attached), is that just "tough -- the newspaper needs a new business model"? Or can the newspaper claim foul?

On TiVo, it is great complementary technology when the viewer is paying for entertainment. When the viewer is the product being sold to an audience, it does not work. Now I personally do not mind if the viewer as product market is destroyed, and I do not want to see anything done to defend it -- but I find it absurd for you to dismiss airily an economic model so embedded in the culture and so favored. In fact, in the real world, TiVo agreed to limit the commercial skipping (you can fast forward, but not skip entirely) and the broadcasters did not put it out of business.

I’d suggest Adam read the piece again; I think most of his analogies are too weak.

Fundamentally, it is clear to me that content must be protected, that this should be done with as little damage as possible to tech, but pure nay-saying answers little.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 2:58 PM | Academia, General, Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

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