A Working Economy Without DRM?

Tilted Equilibrium asks: "In a few weeks, our school will be hosting a panel on DRM with several respected individuals. In advance of the panel, I have been doing some research on the topic and thinking about it in my free time. In economics, we learn that the price of a product is determined essentially by supply and demand. Without a DRM in place, we are capable of making as many copies of a piece of content as we want and seeding it onto the net. How do you create a market for a product, and make money of a product that has a huge initial creative investment, but then no manufacturing cost, and is in infinite supply?"

Comments

Re:Biased question

[Flyboy Connor]

This will never happen on any sort of feasible scale. It isn't a matter of being "honest" (or as most people who take the same position you have, of being "moral") it is a simple matter of economics - rationale consumers will not pay for something they can get for free.

Weird. Computer games can be downloaded for free, or acquired for a very small fee from your neighbourhood copy-peddler. And still the game-development industry is steadily increasing its revenues. And music? People can download any song they want through eDonkey and such, and the music industry does not seem to suffer. Movies? The movie industry gets richer and richer by the day.

You might think it is rational what you say, but practice shows differently. It seems you are not taking everything into account. Probably, if you scan this thread a little more, you'll find out what that is.

Financing the "Star Trek" society

[Paul Fernhout]

An essay I wrote in 2004:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingASt arTrekSociety.html
An excerpt:
"Now, let us move on to the question of where could more money for
education and creativity come from -- such as to fund more creation of
free copyrights and free patents? And where could budget cuts be made so
US parents (and everyone else) could work less hours and devote more
time to their families and charitable hobbies -- including informally
educating their children? As we shall see, a hundred billion dollars
here, a hundred billion dollars there, and soon we are talking real
money. :-)

Let us consider ways to free up money for the non-profit sector (or
reducing working hours) by cutting wasteful government and consumer
spending in these areas with (annual estimate of easy savings):
    * Healthcare ($800 billion),
    * Military ($200 billion),
    * Prisons ($125 billion),
    * Agriculture ($40 billion),
    * Transportation ($250+ billion),
    * Housing ($350+ billion),
    * Manufacturing (very variable),
    * Media (very variable),
    * Banking ($14000 billion up front, $320 billion annually), and
    * Education (very variable).
This is a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085
billion per year. And this is even without considering any lifestyle
changes such as from widespread adoption of Voluntary Simplicity:
    http://world.std.com/~habib/thegarden/simplicity/
which will ultimately result in the largest savings in the US and
worldwide (but I discuss no further here). "