Buy Side Publishing

What are the alternatives to DRM with a viable business model for content producers in an increasingly decentralized market? A new media landscape is unfolding, where revenue leakage does not stem from theft, but competition from participatory models and co-opetition from aggregation models. Participatory models can be exemplified by Wikipedia. Users directly generate the content. Craigslist serves as a Edgeio, Google. Edgeio leverages contributions at the edge of the network into aggregated listings that are complete and complicit. SimplyHired is a vertical search engine for jobs that scours the web for summaries and links. Google search provides fair use summaries in result. All monetize attention wrought through aggregation, largely through advertising market-targeted to the externalities of attention. All realize production and search economies. While the long bet may be that Simon Waldman thinks out loud:

Fact one: aggregation is a fact of online publishing life - now, and even more so in the future. Fact two: even if it's just headlines and links back to content owners sites - if an aggregator is making money from this, they are effectively making money from our content. Fact three: there is currently no structure for content owners and aggregators to have a useful conversation about rights/ licensing etc, beyond the mutual assertion of you need us more than we need you'. Fact four: ultimately, individual aggregators dealing with individual rights holders/ content creators is unworkable for both parties.

His solution is a centralized rights agency, the solution that worked for record labels and radio stations. Unfortunately, that solution was invented in an analog era, and applying it in a digital era will lead to digital rights management. DRM destroys value. I came up with the model for Steven Weber first pointed out, while we have buy vs. build frameworks for the valuation of property, we do not have a framework for informing the decision to open. When you open property for others to innovate upon, I believe the following should be valued:

you grant real options that create, in turn, real options for innovation
you reduce search and distribution costs for qualified buyers
you gain commons-based peer production based on social signals

The costs of opening are relatively nominal, but the risks are not:

you grant arbitrage opportunities to the market
you open yourself to scenarios of inappropriate use according to some moral values, but letting go of control can reduce liability

What's wrong with this model

Disclosures, even for implicit cause: dabble, which is at the heart of remix models.

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