Sunday, November 13, 2005

a method of selling art online without depending upon copyright

Copyright is dead. Next concept:

Imagine for instance an online art gallery. Extremely high-res image files are for sale. Each one is a unique scan, the only one done of a particular physical painting. The images would be priced just as physical art is-- one expensive price for just one buyer. If the buyer wanted they could keep the bits secret-- and be, like a RL art collector, the sole owner-- or if they wanted they could share the resulting file with everyone, and be honored as its Liberator.

Going further with that idea, imagine if the buyer was actually a collective. A piece of art with an asking price of $100 is bought by 2000 people, collectively; they each pay five cents. You could go through the thumbnail galleries, have fun looking at art, and incidentally check off which pictures you'd be willing to pay five cents for. Once things hit their threshholds, they automatically are sold, and all of the buyers' accounts are given access to the file.

This sort of system would enable things to be sold for much smaller stakes, but at the same time it wouldn't preclude making millions of dollars on things. If a popular musician put up their new album for a million dollar ransom, it's quite conceivable that their fans would make it happen. It would however make this a matter of genuine loyalty, and not just anonymous market forces.

<3

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