* Since the 1970s, technologically illiterate politicians and economists have bandied about the idea of an “information economy,” based on buying and selling information piecemeal
* Their bizarre utopia is a world where you can buy and sell information in ever-thinner slices
* Selling the right to watch movies at home but not on vacation
* Selling the right to stream, but not save, a song
* Selling the right to use a program on the phone in your pocket today, but not the right to run it on your next phone
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* Ultimately, selling the right to sell a novel to read on Wednesdays, but only between the hours of 5 and 7, while standing on one leg* Once I was in a meeting at the DVB, where they make the standards for European digital TV, and there was this insane discussion about whether a TV program could be flagged so that you could only watch it in the room where the receiver was
* That is, you couldn’t run a wire or use a wireless transmitter to watch it in another room
* I asked, “Come on, what is this for? It’s not like there’s any law that lets a broadcaster dictate what room you’re allowed to watch a show in”
* And there was a rep from the MPA, the Hollywood movie industry association, there and he said, “Look, watching a movie in one room that’s being received in a different room has value, and if it has value, we should be able to charge money for it”
* Siva Vaidyanthan calls this the “if value, then right” theory — if something has value, someone should have a right to earn money from it
* But I call it it urinary tract infection business model