Legalization and regulation are probably not the solution.
I don't see why not.
I've mentioned before that Stross has suggested a system where your Internet subscription fee subsidizes the various content industries, and, in a world where people aren't prosecuted, we then don't have to worry about obscuring what's getting downloaded and can distribute the wealth depending on who's getting the most downloads.
The problem then becomes (1) ensuring that people don't artificially inflate numbers and (2) finding a way to track downloads to unique users without identifying them.
Basically just compete against illegal organizations the way you'd compete against legal ones. It's probably not hard to take advantage of their inherent weaknesses (i.e. suppliers and consumers don't really want to support them usually).
Yes. Another thing I've mentioned is that users will, in the end, choose the lowest-cost option, where "cost" isn't simply a financial consideration but also accounts for factors such as convenience and ethics.
And yes, lack of supply or unreasonable price are major barriers.
Essentially, a big part of future commerce may be based on volume and microtransactions: making items so cheap that consumers just don't question their purchase.
And this was a key part of Jobs's marketing genius. He understood the sheer psychological power of a ninety-nine-cent price point.
Well, it should be easy to provide better service than file hosting sites.
It's fucking trivial, especially with the kind of resources that Big Content has at its disposal. But they're married to their traditional distribution channels.
An example I keep coming back to is cable TV. It's not fucking going to last; people resent having to pay for a bunch of stations they don't want just to get the ones they do, and WATCH COMMERCIALS ON TOP OF IT. The only reason the fucking thing managed to succeed for three or four decades on those terms was that there was no alternative.
And so we get something like Hulu -- it's just what people want, it's a massive success -- and then the networks BACK OFF IT because IT'S TOO SUCCESSFUL and they're worried they'll lose cable TV subscribers over it.
Going back to the Jobs-is-a-genius-for-charging-ninety-nine-cents example, let's not forget that the RIAA fought tooth and nail to get him to raise that rate, which was the single biggest fucking favor anyone did them this century.
And he finally agreed to do it -- in exchange for effectively ending the practice of putting DRM on music.
(He did, of course, wait until his product had a comfortable monopoly. I'm not saying the dude was acting out of the goodness of his heart. He had the same mercenary motivations as the RIAA -- he just had a working idea of how best to put those motivations to work in the new century.)
