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In fact, companies like N2K Records are already working on use of secure downloading technologies and audio watermarking techniques to enable over-the-Net. If you have a CD-R device on your PC, and an Internet connection, and a credit card, right now you can press your own CD, choosing from a wide selection of pop titles.

The question is, what sort of license does N2K give you with that CD? Most of us aren't going to be happy with the jukebox, pay-as-you-go, model for consuming pop music, and N2K doesn't expect that. You're given a license that says the CD-R you press is for you only, and N2K imprints a digital watermark on your copy of the record, so they can trace you down if you set up a cloning facility in the basement.

So N2K's approach isn't really superdistribution. It's more analogous to end-user printing of textual content. Instead of pressing the CD by the hundreds of thousands at a large plant, they move the "pressing" to people's living rooms. They still rely on a physical object to limit reuse, and we use watermarks to trace illegal redistribution.

Several years ago, John Malone, head of TCI Cable, offered a different vision, where instead of maintaining one's own store of content in the form of physical objects, the cable industry would offer 500 channels, and a wide range of choices. Malone's vision captured the imagination so well that millions of consumers quickly embraced a non-cable technology, direct satellite TV.

Mitch Kapor and others corrected Malone's vision, saying the correct metaphor was one channel, over which you could order any content you want, on demand. Those who dream of fiber optic bandwidth to the home, and vast audio and video-on-demand server farms, and massive deployment of caching and replication technologies, also dream of a world in which consumers keep no copies at all of their digital content. You use a TV set-top navigation box, or follow a hyperlink as you navigate the Web, and you can pull down any kind of text, audio, and video content you want on demand.

Such a world is probably a long way off. But note the contrast between the Circuit City model, in which you own the media that houses the content, and the Malone/Kapor model, in which the media resides at a central serving facility, to be delivered digitally on demand.

Truly Decoupling Content from Distribution

Similarly, there's nothing that says TCI Cable can't "sell" me a copy of my favorite Bogart movie. What I buy is actually a perpetual license to view the movie as many times as I want, for a one-time fee. They simply offer to store the bits on their premises, and promise to stream them to me on demand. Most of us will probably require a long time to adjust to the concept of "owning" something that we do not possess in physical form. The comedian Steven Wright used to joke that "I don't pay my electric bill -- I won't pay for something I can't see." But most of us do pay our electric bill.

So what does all this say to today's Internet content providers?