Evolution of Digital Rights in a Web World - Use it or lose it?

Thursday, September 21. 2006

Evolution of Digital Rights in a Web World - Use it or lose it?

A thought on all the hoo ha regarding YouTube's content and the rights etc.

Video Webcasters are here to stay, this is just the beginning - YouTube is the video equivalent of Napster 1.0…and clearly they are aware of what happened there.

There is a raft of stuff on YouTube like for eg videos of old bands of the 70’s. Sure this stuff is copyrighted, but the holders aren’t publishing anything that you can buy - you can watch it on YouTube however.

Interesting...what is the commercial loss to the rights holder of a person watching something they could not buy anyway.

Seems to me that in a Long Tail, Web Video World a “use it or lose it” sort of approach to rights may emerge in reality.

It will be there anyway, and there is no reason to not make it commercially available if it exists as production and marketing costs are hardly an issue on the Web.

Shocking concept to the established order of things, but the reality is this sort of content will be out there anyway - what will keep it revenue enhancing will be to make it available at a reasonable price.

This could be a next evolution of the User Produced Content model - let people have access to old back catalogue material, let them do the repurposing, give them a small share of the revenue for their trouble and sell it at a fair price.

The alternative is probably that they will do it anyway, and nobody makes any money.

Posted by Alan Patrick in DRM / IP at 01:01 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Interesting thought Alan, but I suspect we might end up paying more for back catalogue stuff via a service that reduces our search costs - kind of like Last.fm. This is sort of what you said on my blog.

#1 Nic Brisbourne (Homepage) on 2006-10-26 10:08 (Reply)

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