Wei Dai wrote: >I think we should consider funding information goods (software, movies, >music, etc.) through tax revenue rather than copyrights. >... I'd like to proposed the following scheme: >Whenever someone first accesses a piece of information, he may be chosen >by the access mechanism randomly, with probability p1, to answer whether >he values that information more than some random amount of money $x. Then >with probability p2, if he answers yes, he is charged $x, otherwise he is >denied access to this piece of information forever. p1 and p2 are both >supposed to be small. In the usual case, he would just be allowed to >access the information for free. >Users in this system would be able to access almost all information for >free, and when they are asked to state their preferences they have >incentives to answer truthfully. ... >Some copy protection would still be needed, so that if someone is denied >access, he is not able to obtain the information from another channel. >However, the idea is that unlike today, the market for such "piracy" would >be so small that no one would have an incentive to supply pirated >information or the tools needed to break copy protection.
This would seem to work badly for socially consumed information goods, like movies or music. If a group of us decides to watch a movie together, one of us tries to download the movie, at which point he may be denied. Should this unusual thing happen, another of us tries. Only in the very unlikely circumstance that all of us are denied will we actually have to face the possibility of paying for it. And even then all we'll reveal is the opportunity cost of this movie, relative to a bunch of other movies we expect to be able to download for free. You'd need very good estimates of the size of groups that sit down to watch the movie together to infer what you want from this data. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
