Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 75

Info for Sale or Rent?

Buying versus Renting

We're all familiar with the concept of renting intellectual property. Every time you go to a video store, you can rent intellectual property -- the movie. Of course, the movie industry offers movies for sale or for rent. But sometimes you make an economic judgment that there's only so many times you want to see the latest Goldie Hawn movie, and the shelf space in your living room just is too precious for you to allocate any for an archive edition of one of her movies.

By contrast, most folks want to listen to audio recordings over and over again, so there isn't much of a market for renting audio tapes or CDs. True, some libraries maintain collections of classical or popular music for checkout, but most of us choose to buy instead of to rent.

In essence, Garth Brooks' argument was that when you buy his latest album on CD, the $15 or so you spend is really more of a license to listen to his record for, oh, 100 times or so. The fact that LPs and cassettes wear out enforces this license; the infernal reliability of CD's undercuts it.

In essence, Circuit City's argument is that they can offer the convenience of purchasing combined with the low cost of video rental. Since a DVD takes up very little space, put that Goldie Hawn flick in your library, and, on some odd chance, if you want to view the movie again someday, you can do so. You'll have to fork over another $3, but you're spared having to drive to the video store, and perhaps find it out of stock.

So Garth would probably like the Circuit City idea. Every album you listen to -- maybe every song -- would carry a counter that ticks over every time you play it. This means dollars going back to Garth (and his record company). Your home stereo becomes a juke box, and it wants real or virtual quarters deposited. My guess is most of us would burn our CD collection before accepting this model.

The Concept of Superdistribution

Superdistribution could apply when there is no physical delivery mechanism at all -- for instance, when content is distributed over the Internet. Given appropriate storage media, such as writable CDs, and given fat pipes for downloading, and given a little software, you could imagine a world in which Garth Brooks albums and Goldie Hawn movies are sent over Internet links to consumers worldwide.

For content providers, superdistribution is quite a liberating concept. Instead of limiting reproduction, you encourage it. You want people to press copies of your CD. You want mirror sites to spring up with all of your Web content intact. After all, you'll be paid in the end.

IBM and others are working on technologies, such as Cryptolopes, that implement secure container models including true superdistribution. See an article I wrote for the October 13 issue of New Media for a discussion of digital content protection technologies. The question is, will any of this play in Peoria?