> I believe this model is outdated, and not suited to the internet age.
> First, because it's so hard to protect your content while at the same
> time making it available (ease of copying is the very essence of this
> medium) ; but most important, because there are better things to do !
>
> A better economic model (a better business plan for your activity) is :
> make money by selling your expertise, your ability to develop new
> content, and *give out* free content as a demonstration of what you can
> do. It's advertising !
[clip]
> Human expertise, unlike computer files, is not easily duplicated ; in
> fact, it's rare, it's precious, it has *value* : it's something people
> will be willing to pay for. Content ? there's gigabytes of it, free,
> on the net, why would I pay for it ?
[this is a robots issue because commercialization is a robots issue.]
well, i agree with you partially. i think that the model you describe fits
to labor intensive craftsmanship very well, but there are an infinite
variety of hybrid models which may give away 80% and sell 20% of their
content product on the web. this is easily protected, despite
transferability, as the transfer of commercial web object-products will
obviate their sale only in extreme cases of poorly designed commercial
products.
a web object (as a data base product) that is rapidly changing or growing
is a commercializable product. by implication you end up renting
processing and updating rather than selling some static piece of
information.
static content is not commercializable on the net at least until it is
encrypted, and then only to the degree that people can be chased after when
they explicitly violate a sales agreement by transfering a document and its
key. but then, responsibility for the security of the key ("the nfs
loophole") partially degrades the seeming universality of this kind of
sales agreement.
this is pretty ugly, though, and more likely to generate ill will than
produce a profit. hardcopy publishing is better as something that can be
hardcopy published has a different value-quality than other static content
which one wouldnt hardcopy publish. i'm sure there are exceptions, and
maybe these are the commercializable static content.
in objectbase terms, static content like an image which is presented with
non-static or default information by association is transferable but not a
likely cause for price degradation, eg, to zero, in the product market.
the value paid for is associativity rather than an image. this is the case
for people with images associated with other data from which objectbase web
objects are dynamically composed.
-john