To quote the article, it is in files marked "Pamela Anderson movie listing.vbs, collegesex.vbs, Battlefield Earth.vbs, Napster Metallica Crack.vbs and NSync.vbs" [...]And think about it... would a good movie be only a few thousand bytes long???
Are you accusing battlefield earth of being a good movie?:) : )
Dynamic scalability of output is a micro-economic concern and effects all industries from one degree to another. It is captured in the slope of the market supply curve (when aggregating individual firms supply curves) and labeled supply elasticity.
ps. Does having an econ degree make one an economist?:)
pps. When you refered to "demand should increase", what you really meant was "quantity demanded should increase"- the demand curve presumably doesn't shift with supply curve shifts.
1. R&D which is publicly subsidized is a rare thing. Artificially inflated defense prices, and school research that is spun off into private interests come to mind. Companies don't have the luxury of being able to manage risk this way in general. Just pooling and options, baby.:)
2. Fair use exemptions are derived from natural limitations to IP, and are a more doctrine than law. I don't _think_ that they were economically motivated...at least not at inception.
3. Rents are simply returns on inputs. This isn't good or bad, just definitional.
4. I'll leave dynamic network economy analysis alone, but there are actually some very cogent references available on these... I'll just say that what you say concerning degradation of standards and exploitation of common properties is sometimes true, though I would be very hesitant to actually point fingers (except maybe at MS). Where it is fairly easy to point at someone infringing the common property, it is often harder to show harm.
5. Policy tools to limit anti-competitive behavior are blunt and inconsistent.
6. Standard general and partial equilibrium economic models deal just fine with information goods. Information economies and network economies are just particular instances of traditional models. (God, who would I cite on this... probably Hal Varian from Berkeley. Carl Shapiro has also written some stuff on this. Do an amazon search- they are both good authors).
7. Personally, I don't feel that the relative intensity of capital in development is nearly as important as the increasing rents on capital in contrast to rents on labor. But then I'm a bleeding heart that way.:)
8. Regarding human capital valuation, I have to say that I'm in the camp that suggests that labor markets are generally monopsonistic. You can play with accounting rules all day long and won't see an improvement in the condition of labor until you can get a competitive labor market.
I guess my big summary is : While a lot of what you say has some relevance and truth, I have yet to find an Economic analysis of a real life solution that doesn't begin with "It depends...". I believe that big G getting into It's R&D is the same kind of thing. I also believe (my point 1) that the actual numbers here are probably not very impressive in terms of GDP, and that we should focus on the real problem of intellectual property policy.
Mister AC was refering to the option value of open source (which certainly exists). Certainly there are free rider and easy rider issues with open source, as with all public goods- but that option value is real, and is something that is not always available with closed source software.
Evangelicism on either side of the security debate is of little use to people who actually have to implement security solutions. And the more value that is placed on that security, the higher the option value of open source is.
and no sustainable business model have stock prices around $200/share
ObPedantic:
The price of a stock has nothing (excepting psychological effects) to do with value. One can only talk about overvalued/undervalued in terms of the total capitalization (price and quantity) and based on other formulas related with return to the equity holder.
If MSFT had 10 outstanding shares, they would probably be a penny or two above $200.:)
I'm sure you knew that, but I shitpick as a matter of habit, and it would be a shame if someone took that as The One Truth.
What I am trying to say is that end to end network design is not inclusive of concepts such as QoS (which I happen to find somewhat interesting). This is relevant in terms of the story because Lessig raises the end-to-end design as a "good" thing, and yet it conflicts with QoS which I happen to think is a "good" thing.
Of course it has _nothing_ to do with fully private LAN/WAN's, but there are many firms who jump over public lines for various portions of their net and they either have to move QoS to a layer above TCP, keep the policies local geographicly, or just blow the bucks and lease lines coast to coast.
Of course, you're probably all over this, but not everyone is. If you are looking for more from slashdot, maybe you should instead try the comp.sys tree or something.
What I find interesting is that the end-to-end network philosophy directly opposes quality of service support on the internet. I have always thought that QoS is essential in private LANs/WANs to shape the bandwidth efficiently, but Lessigs position would keep that off of the internet entirely.
I'm not sure I agree, but it certainly is an interesting philosophical issue: advantages and disadvantages of dumb networks vs. smart networks, especially in the case of networks being largely provided by a small number of wire-holders.
Reasonable efficiency in private health insurance is fundamentally unattainable under a free market system. It has perverse incentives built in from moral hazard of the insured, to the Hippocratic oath taken by the doctors, to the quasi-cartelization of health care insurers. I can't guarentee that full state sponsored health care would be more efficient than a laissez faire system, but some level of government intervention is required to maximize social welfare.
I'll give you "funny", but "informative"- no. This isn't to say that your position is untenable, just that a quick pipe through sed doesn't an argument make. This reminds me of Citizen Cane, where Charles Randolf says, "...post it on the front page and call anyone who says different an anarchist!".
Anyway, I dispute the argument that free markets will find the optimal solution in health care out of hand. The reason? Free markets are very good at creating efficient markets. Finding the optimum price so as to give the most people the most adaquate care. However, this is not what we want when we talk about health care. We don't want efficient treatment, we want TOTAL (or near total) treatment. There are many incentives for Doctors and Patients to press for more health care than is efficient (hippocratic oath comes to mind).
In an efficient health care system, people are killed (loaded word) based on the probability that additional care wouldn't help them. Now discussion of property rights concerning health care (not just the genome projects) are important because they can further stratify the cost of service on marginal cases.
I don't feel like ranting right now, but there is a good chapter on this kind of thing in "The Age of Diminished Expectations" [Krugman].
Bottom line: free markets lead to efficient solutions + Society demands a non-efficient solution = We have problems.
I am all for companies rigorously defending their rights granted under copyright law (I even respect said rights). What I don't like is erosion of fair-use doctrine (in terms of my interpretation of digital eqivilents to analog rights), and interpretation of that doctrine in such a way as that it restricts my use.
The current burr in my saddle is the trend that I am seeing for "licenses" to explicitely (or implicitely in the case of DVDR) forbid me from excercising freedoms which I was guarenteed under previous law.
I've been tossing this idea around for quite a while.
When you are engaging in a transaction that entails a hidden contract that reduces your rights provided to you under federal law, you should be fully informed before you make such a decision.
In many of the cases of concern to me, there is asymmetric information where (unsurprisingly) the larger entity (usually seller) has the ability to obtain this information, but the smaller entity does not. This seems to be exascerbated (I'm mangling that spelling) by our legal system which seems to spiral into complexity.
Caveat Emptor. We generally push the burden of obtaining information onto the purchaser, but there are exceptions to this in other places where there are large information asymmetries (lemon laws, etc).
Maybe in the future intellectual property will pick up its share of consumer protection laws- right now, It really feels like consumers are getting screwed. Even if the consumer never planned on archiving their own DVDs, they are being hurt by the DMCA which will effectively stop cheap burners from hitting the market since it effectively limits competition and allows the CCA to create a cartel of solution providers.
>.Unless you are the copyright holder, you do NOT own the music. You own the media the music is on, and you have a license to play the music. Very similar to a software license.
I didn't sign any contract. I purchased copyrighted material, and my usage rights and usage limitations are covered under federal copyright law.
I understand your point, but as long as we are playing language lawyer (doh- I guess this is playing _real_ lawyer:) ) I figured I'd lay down my clarification.
I feel utterly unable to comment on AHRA, but I feel confident that if the MPAA took me to court concerning my CDs which have been MP3ed on my computer and aren't shared with the world, I would win.
But then, I guess the courts could find me wrong.:) For me, the risk is worth it.
Well of course there is no cartel provision- the question is whether UCITA provides incentives to cartelize.
I personally don't see this as happening at all, as the primary characteristic of cartel markets are strongly oligopolistic suppliers with opportunities for collusion. Of course software doesn't really fit this description, and since barriers to entry for IT solutions are relatively low, cartels aren't something that I would be concerned about as an IT manager.
OK, you are a lawyer so riddle me this:
There is a beast called a contract, and there is a beast called a transaction. Transactions have implied contracts ( implied warranties of merchantability, etc. ).
I have always respected the contract, but more and more, we are shifting limitations of use into an implicite contract of transaction.
UCITA supports the concept of taking my rights away without my signiture. (of course, VHS tapes are sold under implicite license as well and I don't really have a problem with this). I guess my real beef is that EULA's are very difficult to understand, and people are losing their rights without fully understanding what they are giving up. To my mind, this is transaction by misdirection (fraud?).
Of course, I'm talking about "little rights" above, and not natural rights, but still- how can you support this?
Guh. I actually worked on that many years ago (not the lower level but the programming API - MessageHandler to be specific). In any event, I don't know which "hardware interface" he is talking about but I'm pretty sure the lowest level was a glom of C and ASM. There were a couple hardware emulation and abstraction layers that sat real close to the iron that were written in C++ though. What was _great_ was the developement environment- They had an IDE called LanDE which ran on the RS6000s and AIX. I loved it.
Of course, this had to be 8 years ago, and I can't remember what I ate for dinner last week, so its worth what you paid for it.:)
In light of the rest of those comments above I figured I should mention that I agree with you completely.
Of course it could be that the line you quoted was written for simplicity of communication rather than being truely dissingenuous, but still you would expect a man of his experience to be a little more careful with his words than some hack like me.
*shrug* There is nothing wrong with any of his choices but he should be up front about them.
I think you hit the nail squarely on the head here.
So now that we see that we have an effective market failure, it is worth looking into the causes of that. Certainly a large part of the issue are information markets structures- increasing returns to scale, Marginal costs near or at zero, Network effects, etc.
What I am concerned about more and more is marketing (and congitive psychology). The whole lassie faire idea is predicated on the consumers making rational choices, but truely effective marketing can cause choices to be sub-optimal.
I have no real information on this- it just troubles me. Maybe the capitalistic system is vulnerable to marketing attacks.
I think I agree with that AC. If it was a legitimate reverse engineering, then the algorythm which was a trade secret is now open. (You can argue that it was not reversed fairly- I don't know the facts).
The CA case is whether their alg. was covered under implicite copyright. (I doubt it).
The NY case is whether the alg. is illegal to distribute under the DCMA (I think so).
Its really interesting that something which should be fair game may be choked down because of that NY case. I suppose that someone could rewrite the css-auth code in mathematical terms and distribute that though.
I tend to agree with most of what you wrote (except for the advocacy of piracy).
After rethinking, I agree that my argument would be bad. As a decision maker, you can't "price" for piracy. It is an unrecoverable cost.
For an interesting excercise (which I failed), try to come up with a reasonable incentive for Intel to make this tech. Consumers won't want it because its more expensive, intel can't charge producers since it is selling to consumers (who aren't going to want to pay licensing either).
Ah well, this generated much more attacks than I would have thought.:)
Ya, I think I agree. I was thinking about it as a decision maker trying to maximize profits, not trying to prevent piracy.
What I decided is that you really can't price for piracy, but piracy is in fact a hidden cost. Presumably, some of those pirates would have actually purchased. In this situation, what you would see is some kind of method for content to be limited to devices which are encrypted all the way along the pipe.
What I don't see is how intel would plan to leverage this tech. They aren't content producers, they can't charge the content producers licence fees. They would end up having to sell their devices for a higher price to offset the additional devel cost.
Ah well...it looks like a few people didn't agree with me.:)
This is just a minor nitpick, but the marginal cost will not move to zero, but to the per unit license fee that Rambus Inc. charges.
What I really don't understand is why Intel hasn't cut its losses on this. From an uninformed observer's perspective, it seems that there is a strong incentive for _all_ players to move to DDR in the near term and offload Rambus tech towards "special projects" which need tomorrows bus speeds today (which is to say not servers, or PCs, but research devices).
I'm guessing from an economic perspective that they are weighing the advantages of control (they do get sole distrobution rights from Rambus, right?) of the market greater than the traditional advantages of low fixed capital transition costs. This seems a bad strategy to me, since intel really isn't in the memory market, and that they're primary sales are in semiconductors.
Ah well... I'm sure their decision makers have more info than I do.:)
I'm playing devils advocate here, but it could be argued that the price of information content is artificially higher due to pricing considerations of piracy. If this technology could somehow knock that piracy out, we could see drops in content prices that could offset the increased costs of hardware.
This is a metric buttload of conjecture, but still economicly possible.
Nope. It's illegal for anyone who didn't buy a CSS license from the CCA to produce a S-encrypted disc. The CCA owns CSS, so it doesn't apply to them.
And how do they "own" it? It certainly isn't patented. Their implementation of the algorythm may be covered under copyright, but my understanding is that the CSS algorithm is open game at this point.
That said, you have to have a vendor-key that ties out correctly, and I'm not sure how you would be able to get one. Other companies vendor-key's are probably covered under some kind of copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
"US lags behind Europe in privacy"
"Corrupt politician found to be taking bribes"
"Insurrection fails, Castro still in power"
Or from the Onion: "Model decides to give acting 'a shot'".
(Though I have to admit to enjoying much of the stuff people post on these stories...)
Are you accusing battlefield earth of being a good movie? :) : )
Dynamic scalability of output is a micro-economic concern and effects all industries from one degree to another. It is captured in the slope of the market supply curve (when aggregating individual firms supply curves) and labeled supply elasticity.
:)
ps. Does having an econ degree make one an economist?
pps. When you refered to "demand should increase", what you really meant was "quantity demanded should increase"- the demand curve presumably doesn't shift with supply curve shifts.
I'm mostly on board with you, but...
1. R&D which is publicly subsidized is a rare thing. Artificially inflated defense prices, and school research that is spun off into private interests come to mind. Companies don't have the luxury of being able to manage risk this way in general. Just pooling and options, baby. :)
2. Fair use exemptions are derived from natural limitations to IP, and are a more doctrine than law. I don't _think_ that they were economically motivated...at least not at inception.
3. Rents are simply returns on inputs. This isn't good or bad, just definitional.
4. I'll leave dynamic network economy analysis alone, but there are actually some very cogent references available on these... I'll just say that what you say concerning degradation of standards and exploitation of common properties is sometimes true, though I would be very hesitant to actually point fingers (except maybe at MS). Where it is fairly easy to point at someone infringing the common property, it is often harder to show harm.
5. Policy tools to limit anti-competitive behavior are blunt and inconsistent.
6. Standard general and partial equilibrium economic models deal just fine with information goods. Information economies and network economies are just particular instances of traditional models. (God, who would I cite on this... probably Hal Varian from Berkeley. Carl Shapiro has also written some stuff on this. Do an amazon search- they are both good authors).
7. Personally, I don't feel that the relative intensity of capital in development is nearly as important as the increasing rents on capital in contrast to rents on labor. But then I'm a bleeding heart that way. :)
8. Regarding human capital valuation, I have to say that I'm in the camp that suggests that labor markets are generally monopsonistic. You can play with accounting rules all day long and won't see an improvement in the condition of labor until you can get a competitive labor market.
I guess my big summary is : While a lot of what you say has some relevance and truth, I have yet to find an Economic analysis of a real life solution that doesn't begin with "It depends...". I believe that big G getting into It's R&D is the same kind of thing. I also believe (my point 1) that the actual numbers here are probably not very impressive in terms of GDP, and that we should focus on the real problem of intellectual property policy.
Mister AC was refering to the option value of open source (which certainly exists). Certainly there are free rider and easy rider issues with open source, as with all public goods- but that option value is real, and is something that is not always available with closed source software.
Evangelicism on either side of the security debate is of little use to people who actually have to implement security solutions. And the more value that is placed on that security, the higher the option value of open source is.
ObPedantic:
The price of a stock has nothing (excepting psychological effects) to do with value. One can only talk about overvalued/undervalued in terms of the total capitalization (price and quantity) and based on other formulas related with return to the equity holder.
If MSFT had 10 outstanding shares, they would probably be a penny or two above $200. :)
I'm sure you knew that, but I shitpick as a matter of habit, and it would be a shame if someone took that as The One Truth.
Smooches to you too.
What I am trying to say is that end to end network design is not inclusive of concepts such as QoS (which I happen to find somewhat interesting). This is relevant in terms of the story because Lessig raises the end-to-end design as a "good" thing, and yet it conflicts with QoS which I happen to think is a "good" thing.
Of course it has _nothing_ to do with fully private LAN/WAN's, but there are many firms who jump over public lines for various portions of their net and they either have to move QoS to a layer above TCP, keep the policies local geographicly, or just blow the bucks and lease lines coast to coast.
Of course, you're probably all over this, but not everyone is. If you are looking for more from slashdot, maybe you should instead try the comp.sys tree or something.
Best wishes- JJL
What I find interesting is that the end-to-end network philosophy directly opposes quality of service support on the internet. I have always thought that QoS is essential in private LANs/WANs to shape the bandwidth efficiently, but Lessigs position would keep that off of the internet entirely.
I'm not sure I agree, but it certainly is an interesting philosophical issue: advantages and disadvantages of dumb networks vs. smart networks, especially in the case of networks being largely provided by a small number of wire-holders.
bah.
Reasonable efficiency in private health insurance is fundamentally unattainable under a free market system. It has perverse incentives built in from moral hazard of the insured, to the Hippocratic oath taken by the doctors, to the quasi-cartelization of health care insurers. I can't guarentee that full state sponsored health care would be more efficient than a laissez faire system, but some level of government intervention is required to maximize social welfare.
I'll give you "funny", but "informative"- no. This isn't to say that your position is untenable, just that a quick pipe through sed doesn't an argument make. This reminds me of Citizen Cane, where Charles Randolf says, "...post it on the front page and call anyone who says different an anarchist!".
Heh. Someone moderated the above as funny.
Anyway, I dispute the argument that free markets will find the optimal solution in health care out of hand. The reason? Free markets are very good at creating efficient markets. Finding the optimum price so as to give the most people the most adaquate care. However, this is not what we want when we talk about health care. We don't want efficient treatment, we want TOTAL (or near total) treatment. There are many incentives for Doctors and Patients to press for more health care than is efficient (hippocratic oath comes to mind).
In an efficient health care system, people are killed (loaded word) based on the probability that additional care wouldn't help them. Now discussion of property rights concerning health care (not just the genome projects) are important because they can further stratify the cost of service on marginal cases.
I don't feel like ranting right now, but there is a good chapter on this kind of thing in "The Age of Diminished Expectations" [Krugman].
Bottom line: free markets lead to efficient solutions + Society demands a non-efficient solution = We have problems.
You don't have to. All it takes is the little © on the disc to put copying, redistribution, and "fair use" under the jurisdiction of (US) federal law. You bought the disc, but not the right to copy it. It's taken for granted thet you can't go buy a book, Xerox it's contents and hand it out on the street corner, why should music be different?
I agree absolutely.
I am all for companies rigorously defending their rights granted under copyright law (I even respect said rights). What I don't like is erosion of fair-use doctrine (in terms of my interpretation of digital eqivilents to analog rights), and interpretation of that doctrine in such a way as that it restricts my use.
The current burr in my saddle is the trend that I am seeing for "licenses" to explicitely (or implicitely in the case of DVDR) forbid me from excercising freedoms which I was guarenteed under previous law.
I've been tossing this idea around for quite a while.
When you are engaging in a transaction that entails a hidden contract that reduces your rights provided to you under federal law, you should be fully informed before you make such a decision.
In many of the cases of concern to me, there is asymmetric information where (unsurprisingly) the larger entity (usually seller) has the ability to obtain this information, but the smaller entity does not. This seems to be exascerbated (I'm mangling that spelling) by our legal system which seems to spiral into complexity.
Caveat Emptor. We generally push the burden of obtaining information onto the purchaser, but there are exceptions to this in other places where there are large information asymmetries (lemon laws, etc).
Maybe in the future intellectual property will pick up its share of consumer protection laws- right now, It really feels like consumers are getting screwed. Even if the consumer never planned on archiving their own DVDs, they are being hurt by the DMCA which will effectively stop cheap burners from hitting the market since it effectively limits competition and allows the CCA to create a cartel of solution providers.
>.>.If I OWN the music
>.Unless you are the copyright holder, you do NOT own the music. You own the media the music is on, and you have a license to play the music. Very similar to a software license.
I didn't sign any contract. I purchased copyrighted material, and my usage rights and usage limitations are covered under federal copyright law.
I understand your point, but as long as we are playing language lawyer (doh- I guess this is playing _real_ lawyer :) ) I figured I'd lay down my clarification.
I feel utterly unable to comment on AHRA, but I feel confident that if the MPAA took me to court concerning my CDs which have been MP3ed on my computer and aren't shared with the world, I would win.
But then, I guess the courts could find me wrong. :) For me, the risk is worth it.
Well of course there is no cartel provision- the question is whether UCITA provides incentives to cartelize.
I personally don't see this as happening at all, as the primary characteristic of cartel markets are strongly oligopolistic suppliers with opportunities for collusion. Of course software doesn't really fit this description, and since barriers to entry for IT solutions are relatively low, cartels aren't something that I would be concerned about as an IT manager.
OK, you are a lawyer so riddle me this:
There is a beast called a contract, and there is a beast called a transaction. Transactions have implied contracts ( implied warranties of merchantability, etc. ).
I have always respected the contract, but more and more, we are shifting limitations of use into an implicite contract of transaction.
UCITA supports the concept of taking my rights away without my signiture. (of course, VHS tapes are sold under implicite license as well and I don't really have a problem with this). I guess my real beef is that EULA's are very difficult to understand, and people are losing their rights without fully understanding what they are giving up. To my mind, this is transaction by misdirection (fraud?).
Of course, I'm talking about "little rights" above, and not natural rights, but still- how can you support this?
Guh. I actually worked on that many years ago (not the lower level but the programming API - MessageHandler to be specific). In any event, I don't know which "hardware interface" he is talking about but I'm pretty sure the lowest level was a glom of C and ASM. There were a couple hardware emulation and abstraction layers that sat real close to the iron that were written in C++ though. What was _great_ was the developement environment- They had an IDE called LanDE which ran on the RS6000s and AIX. I loved it.
:)
Of course, this had to be 8 years ago, and I can't remember what I ate for dinner last week, so its worth what you paid for it.
In light of the rest of those comments above I figured I should mention that I agree with you completely.
Of course it could be that the line you quoted was written for simplicity of communication rather than being truely dissingenuous, but still you would expect a man of his experience to be a little more careful with his words than some hack like me.
*shrug* There is nothing wrong with any of his choices but he should be up front about them.
I think you hit the nail squarely on the head here.
So now that we see that we have an effective market failure, it is worth looking into the causes of that. Certainly a large part of the issue are information markets structures- increasing returns to scale, Marginal costs near or at zero, Network effects, etc.
What I am concerned about more and more is marketing (and congitive psychology). The whole lassie faire idea is predicated on the consumers making rational choices, but truely effective marketing can cause choices to be sub-optimal.
I have no real information on this- it just troubles me. Maybe the capitalistic system is vulnerable to marketing attacks.
Thanks alot! Very informative!
I think I agree with that AC. If it was a legitimate reverse engineering, then the algorythm which was a trade secret is now open. (You can argue that it was not reversed fairly- I don't know the facts).
The CA case is whether their alg. was covered under implicite copyright. (I doubt it).
The NY case is whether the alg. is illegal to distribute under the DCMA (I think so).
Its really interesting that something which should be fair game may be choked down because of that NY case. I suppose that someone could rewrite the css-auth code in mathematical terms and distribute that though.
I tend to agree with most of what you wrote (except for the advocacy of piracy).
After rethinking, I agree that my argument would be bad. As a decision maker, you can't "price" for piracy. It is an unrecoverable cost.
For an interesting excercise (which I failed), try to come up with a reasonable incentive for Intel to make this tech. Consumers won't want it because its more expensive, intel can't charge producers since it is selling to consumers (who aren't going to want to pay licensing either).
Ah well, this generated much more attacks than I would have thought. :)
Ya, I think I agree. I was thinking about it as a decision maker trying to maximize profits, not trying to prevent piracy.
What I decided is that you really can't price for piracy, but piracy is in fact a hidden cost. Presumably, some of those pirates would have actually purchased. In this situation, what you would see is some kind of method for content to be limited to devices which are encrypted all the way along the pipe.
What I don't see is how intel would plan to leverage this tech. They aren't content producers, they can't charge the content producers licence fees. They would end up having to sell their devices for a higher price to offset the additional devel cost.
Ah well...it looks like a few people didn't agree with me. :)
This is just a minor nitpick, but the marginal cost will not move to zero, but to the per unit license fee that Rambus Inc. charges.
What I really don't understand is why Intel hasn't cut its losses on this. From an uninformed observer's perspective, it seems that there is a strong incentive for _all_ players to move to DDR in the near term and offload Rambus tech towards "special projects" which need tomorrows bus speeds today (which is to say not servers, or PCs, but research devices).
I'm guessing from an economic perspective that they are weighing the advantages of control (they do get sole distrobution rights from Rambus, right?) of the market greater than the traditional advantages of low fixed capital transition costs. This seems a bad strategy to me, since intel really isn't in the memory market, and that they're primary sales are in semiconductors.
Ah well... I'm sure their decision makers have more info than I do. :)
I'm playing devils advocate here, but it could be argued that the price of information content is artificially higher due to pricing considerations of piracy. If this technology could somehow knock that piracy out, we could see drops in content prices that could offset the increased costs of hardware.
This is a metric buttload of conjecture, but still economicly possible.
And how do they "own" it? It certainly isn't patented. Their implementation of the algorythm may be covered under copyright, but my understanding is that the CSS algorithm is open game at this point.
That said, you have to have a vendor-key that ties out correctly, and I'm not sure how you would be able to get one. Other companies vendor-key's are probably covered under some kind of copyright.
Caveat: I know much less than I think I do.
Looks like you got bit by the "preview" bug.
FWIW, the index to Melancholy Elephants (at least when I just went searching for it) is 39.