Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Xanadu--some initial reactions

Author:Wesley Felter
Posted:8/26/1999; 11:08:14 AM
Topic:Xanadu--some initial reactions
Msg #:9968 (In response to 9959)
Prev/Next:9967 / 9969

Of course, the Xanadu idea is that you'll pay for those bytes directly. But there seems to be an assumption that everyone will play nice, no one will make free copies. There doesn't seem to be any real enforcement mechanism, which isn't surprising because real enforcement is probably impossible--sooner or later you have to generate plaintext for the user to see, and if there's plaintext there's a crack. There has to be a different payment model.

Maybe not. The standard answer to that is to make it cheap enough to buy a legit copy that people won't bother looking for anything else. Also, you just have to take into account the fact that there will always be a certain amount of copying; instead of worrying about it so much, just build it into the business model. As an example, I've heard the very expensive RELease 1.0 allows a certain amount of legitimate free copying, treating it as free advertising.

Another issue is search engines. If I was selling content I would definitely want the search engines to index it, but I doubt they'd be willing to pay for it. So you'd have to find some way to allow free access for search engines but not for normal users.

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