When a demand for information products has been generated, it is necessary to secure the potential customers’ willingness to pay and to avoid the free rider problem, which duplication of information would represent. Copyright rules28 and technical solutions involving the marking of content would make it possible to sell and buy information on digital networks. However, the Internet is currently challenging the very idea of intellectual property rights: copyright rules go against what is common practice amongst Web surfers, who make free use of content and recompose it to create something new. As has been seen, copyright rules are inconsistent with Internet ideology. It is appropriate, therefore, to examine how copyright might evolve on the Internet.
The exploitation of information products without copyright-type protection could be imagined:
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either on the basis of secondary products, when these are not purely information based (i.e. products for which the costs of duplication and distribution are high). Admittedly, this strategy is already in use but is still based on copyright: an appreciable proportion of income from a movie now comes from the sale of merchandise linked in one way or another to this movie (for example books);
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or, since the value of information lies in the means which publicize its existence and enable it to be found, the exploitation of information products could be achieved by charging for search engine services, by subscription or usage based tariff. An economically rational evolution of this type is, nevertheless, unlikely in the current context - search engines have always been provided free of charge because they are necessary to the Web’s growth, just like a directory is necessary for the use of a telephone network.
Charging for information products can also be conceived upstream, at the very level of the community from which the demand originates. This would involve paying to take part in a structured group of potential consumers; thus the Web surfer would pay for the fact that it was by participating in this group that he became aware of the product in question, that he was lead to appreciate it and that he could enjoy talking about it. This type of payment may consist at least partially of work and shared expertise (such as the development of software in the case of freewares).
In this way, the development of Web sites on the Internet would undoubtedly give rise to an evolution in the rules which protect content. It is possible, for example, to draw the following sketch of such an evolution:
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an initial, chaotic phase, in which the unrefined application of existing copyright rules to services available on the Internet would demonstrate the unsuitability of this type of regulation for digital networks;
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an intermediate phase, during which intellectual property rights will be adapted to the network or even suspended. The willingness to pay created on the Internet will be collected through secondary product - even if a book is available in extenso on the network, it may be advantageous to buy it in book shops (sale price is lower than the cost of printing locally and the item is easier to handle);
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an advanced phase, characterized by a displacement of copyright rules from content towards the customers themselves. Property rights in information would then be replaced by fair-competition rules adapted to network communities. In particular, rights and constraints regarding links between sites should be analyzed from an economic and legal standpoint: the essential resource on the Internet lies in the displacement of web surfers over the hypertext graph offered to them.
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