How do you become the richest person in the world in virtually no time at all?
Find a way to stop unauthorized copying of content.
Copyright originally started a couple hundred years after the invention of the printing press. Even before the printing press was invented however, content was being copied.
Copyright law describes what is allowed, and what is not allowed, and the assorted legal remedies available to those who have had their content copied in an unauthorized fashion.
What nobody has ever done successfully is to prevent it. Billions of dollars have been spent on that, but so far, no successful method exists. Not even one.
The problem is getting content into the hands of a reader or viewer and allowing people to read or view that content under controlled circumstances without them being able to copy it.
For the last several centuries this has proven to be an insoluble problem. Even now, with our assorted technological gimcrackery, we’re still no closer to solving the problem than we were in the 14th century.
Some believe that it is impossible to solve. Some believe that it is quite possible, but that people choose not to do it.
Whatever the case, the first person to actually make it feasible will have their door beaten down by every publisher and content-creator on the planet, and be buried under incalculably large piles of money.
Someone would just end up stealing the technology from them.
-ls/cm
(posting this comment just to track the comments by email
Most reviled, too.
all we need to do is revoke most of the dmca law of 1998
. its the bad made law offering safe harbor to server owners like LL and google.
proper law balanced the value of IP for a century, this ONE bad law has begun to ruin it for the next century.
And doing that will give you the funds to start work on a perpetual motion machine, too!
Give me the money and then I’ll tell you. Trust me.
Cuts and Pastes this article so I can use it on my on blog later.
There isn’t much money in preventative security practices. Reasonable prices, a permissive marketing model, and open availability are the best defense against opportunistic copyright infringement, and you won’t make money off that unless you’re bundling all that together into a content distribution channel.
C3: Without the DMCA, most of your favorite web sites and interconnected apps would not be able to exist. The DMCA is a blanket measure that says that as long as applications make a good faith effort to reasonably fight copyright infringement in their userbase, they can pass the buck. Thus, this clears the way for the content distribution industry to directly go after the people in violation instead of attacking the tools, which everyone use.
That said, it’s not a perfect compromise, but it has enabled us to do an awful lot.