Storage and copyrights. There is little doubt that the current copyright system, and how copyright owners sell their poducts, is in freefall. The reason for this is the rapid growth in storage capacity.
The PC is, and will continue to be, a device that augments an individual's mind. It provides mental leverage. It makes people more productive. The PC also self selects users. People who have a voracious appetite for extending and enhancing their minds use PCs.
In this model, unutilized capacity is an anathema. Spare processor cycles, unused storage space, and unused bandwidth are an invitation to expand a PC users mind. Like an entrepreneur, the mind finds ways to fill or use this excess. This is perhaps why Americans have a love affair with the PC and have resisted using interactive phones. American's are entrepreneurs. To us, a smart phone looks like a child's toy when compared to the PC's power and capacity to extend the mind.
With this in mind, it's easy to see that the real driver behind the attack on digital media copyrights is the rapid expansion of storage space on PCs. It is doubling faster than Moore's law. The standard $2000 PC today sells with 120 Gb of storage space more than twice what was available on the standard PC last year at this time. This unused space asks, no demands, to be filled. What are people filling it with? Music. Movies. Digital media.
The entertainment industries greatest fault is that it isn't finding ways to fill this unused capacity with their products. They want to keep a system in place that slowly dribbles digital media to customers in a tightly managed way, in spite of the fact that customers demand, and can easily absorb, a firehose of digital media. Until the entertainment industry finds a way to open the floodgates they will be the losers in this battle. Personal leverage through the use of technology is the greatest trend of all time. Fighting that is not just stupid, it's insane. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:16:28 AM 
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