What will the future be like for digital media?

I have some thoughts on this that are not completely organized.  I don't have time to get them really organized, so I'm just going to present my thoughts in perhaps a somewhat disorganized way.

What is missing today, which will make a big difference years hence, is a wealth of public domain content.  A lot of the digital content available today is treated by many consumers as if it were public domain.  That use by consumers is what has got the content owners so angry.  On the one hand, we have consumers wanting to claim "fair use" rights, and on the other hand we have content owners wanting to call every use they don't approve of "piracy". 

Leaving aside a discussion of fair use rights, I don't think this situation would be so charged if there were a large selection of public domain content.  Consumers have the tools to do lots of very creative things with digital content: the result being what is often called "derivative works".  There just isn't that much public domain content at the present time.

I would be quite happy just to get public domain recordings of popular classical works, and even some of the jazz and big band recordings from the first half of the 20th century.  Many of these recordings are no longer marketable.  Really, no one's going to make any money off some of the old recordings from the 1940's and 1950's.  Let's get them into the public domain.  Same with the old movies and photographs.

A wealth of content in the public domain would certainly lessen the value of current content.  For that reason, the content owners have a vested interest in trying to keep works out of the public domain.  Nevertheless, I think the public domain is good for consumers.  It will force the current content producers to compete, to produce something of real value, not artificially inflated value that results from artificial scarcity.

With a large number of works in the public domain, the beta-max argument applied to peer-to-peer file sharing becomes more compelling.  The Napster clones would have a legitimate use in exchanging content that's in the public domain.

I would like to see the issue of digital rights resolved with a push to get more content into the public domain.  Content owners should be able to protect their content for the "limited times" that is stated in the U.S. constitution.  However, all content should eventually pass into the public domain.  We can argue over how long that should be.  Certainly, 75 years is away too long (as specified by the Copyright Term Extension Act).

If you think about it, there will be more and more content in the public domain as time goes on.  For that reason, I don't think the issues today, about how much control content owners should have over their content, will be issues 50 years from now.  By then, there should be a lot of content in the public domain.  That means there will be legitimate, legal, free content available as an alternative to non-free content.  Most people like me won't care that the latest content isn't free.  We will just choose the free content when we can.  That will happen with Pallidium or without it.

I'll be watching Eldred v. Ashcroft.

5:49:39 PM