On the Time Preference for Information...

LL asks: "Altering the price of digital content is a common tactic to capture the time-preference characteristics of consumers (e.g. movie tickets for immediate first releases down to free-to-air a couple of years later). We would all like to get the latest and greatest, but are people willing to tolerate restrictions such as paying more for music that they can share with friends? The polarization of views from the share everything (FSF) to everyone is a selfish individual (digital distribution industry) is being contested through new business models on the Internet with players such as (AOL+InterTrust)|Sony willing to experiment with novel and more subtle forms of control. However, will prosumers protest over the increasing technological obsolescence if they purchase music/software and find out a few years later their hardware is not supported and their music/software collections become worthless? Are we buying a life-time's right to own or merely licensing access for a short time? If an individual/company releases/sells stuff, whether GPL or EULA, should they explicitly warn people of the downstream implications (e.g. if we discontinue hardware support you will be forced to pay for software upgrade fees)? Curious minds would like to know if there is a fairer system."