flynn23 wrote:

] did you see last week's column? look in Old Hat

Yeah, how much of that article was just a verbatim quote of what you wrote? It's hard to tell.

One thing wrong with the Snapster business model: What's the incentive for the artist? People seem to forget the commodity. Sure, buy the whole catalog of recorded works that you can for a little over a million dollars. When the next hot album comes out, the system collapses if the record company isn't moving cellophane like it used to. Where would the money for marketing come from? I think consumer demand is extremely fickle. For this to work as envisioned, a lot of the supposely "prehistoric" systems would still need to remain in place, such as mass media hype.

How would rights revocation work? Suppose an out of print recording is lost from the vault. Would all users in the co-op still have rights to their backups? I don't think they'd be able to continue trading backups. It is an interesting idea though.

RE: I, Cringely | The Pulpit