Here's a great piece on why rampant piracy doesn't have to be the end of the music industry, with insights drawn from the Chinese experience. It's a vision for digital music that I support completely, but there are still some interesting questions.
The biggest is this: music, thanks to its nature as a performance art, has built-in subsidiary value associated with widespread distribution -- that is, making promotional recordings available might well support a career in live performance for some artists. But how does this new conception of intellectual property deal with other arts, where there might not be any subsidiary value? Can a digital photographer find related work by allowing the free distribution of her photographs? A poet? Of course, poetry and even digital photography don't seem to be experiencing the same piracy crisis as music right now. But there's plenty of piracy when it comes to movies, and it's hard to see how releasing movies for free online will bring movie creators sustainable related work.
MORE: This will probably horrify a lot of people, but I don't know why government subsidy isn't on the table for dealing with digitization and piracy. What I mean is: if we can collectively decide that a particular art is a public good and allow it to be freely distributed, its production could be subsidized by the government instead of left to the market. This makes some sense, because technology is turning the production of some of these arts into a classic collective action problem -- nobody's willing to pay for them anymore, even though everyone wants them. Obviously deciding which artists and even which arts get the subsidy could be a problem, but there are ways of dealing with this (I'm thinking now about some kind of basic popularity threshhold). And I'm willing to bet moving to subsidies would actually cost less than the growing efficiency losses to piracy (including some soon-to-be drugwar-esque costs of enforcement) that we're facing under the current system.
AND: stAllio! has more about one of the organizations mentioned in the article.
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