What is the value of mass-distributed media when its distribution effectively costs little or nothing (if distributed virally via BitTorrent)? And how does this value correspond to the value of the work that went into producing it? In fact, does it correspond at all any more? If ten million people want to buy a song that I wrote, does the money they pay for that song really belong to me? Did I work for it, in the sense that the money paid corresponds to my labor? And if it doesn’t belong to me, who does it belong to?

I have utopian vision on this: At the moment the “big sellers” in the media world get an obscene amount of money for their work and countless other artists get almost nothing. Suppose we create a new media distribution model called “Equitable Artists” (yes, that’s a reference back to United Artists) that works like this, using a new record label as an example:

• All the money received for all the sales from the label’s artists goes into a big pool
• The big sellers get more money than the small sellers, but using a key that still distributes the money more equitably
• There is a maximum limit on income anyone working for the label can get, including both artists and label owners
• All the money left over goes to the promotion and development of new artists, young artists etc.

There are a lot of stumbling-blocks to this, among other things whether artists would actually sign for a label like this. However, people also said that open source wouldn’t work, and it does. Just an idea for the day…

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Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.

Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.

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Maybe it’s time to treat digital media formats in the same way as radio spectrum bandwidth: We don’t have any problem with regulating the radio spectrum because it’s clearly a limited resource that everybody needs to use. Leaving it completely open would obviously make the spectrum useless.

The same applies to digital formats, it’s just not as immediately obvious. For example, a situation in which four or five different high-definition DVD formats coexist would effectively be as chaotic and useless as an unregulated radio spectrum.

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Ever been too late handing in your exam paper? There’s no need to worry if you’re studying at a big university. Here’s how to solve the problem:

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Getting sick of telemarketers? Tom Mabe found a great way to give them a really bad day. Listen to it here.

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