{{tag>"copyright" }}
======reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated======
After a little hiatus, I'm back, albeit only temporarily.

The folks at [[http://www.cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/blog/|The House of Commons]] have [[http://www.cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/blog/2007/01/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-us.html|asked]] for five things they didn't know about me. I'll keep this brief:
1. I don't like chain letters or getting-to-know-you-internet-memes. This explains why I haven't replied sooner :)
2. I'm taking a four month leave of absence from my work at QUT in order to take a job at a Brisbane firm. Expect a return to your scheduled programming around June. I have no idea how much I'll be blogging during this period.

**And now: Vista and renting digital entertainment**

Vista is in the news, and The Age asks [[http://www.theage.com.au/news/biztech/vista-launches-with-new-music-rental-service/2007/01/30/1169919321986.html|Why buy when you can rent?]] A deal has been made with Sanity, where a user can pay between $40 and $60 a month to rent an unlimited amount of music from Sanity's catalogue. The business model is exciting - solid, predictable income, and extremely high switching costs. After a year subscribed with Sanity, who's going to let their built up music collection disintegrate by canceling their subscription? 

I'm not comfortable with this model. The idea of paying what seems like a fairly high price for merely renting music is unappealing to me. More generally though, it's not going to be long before this is all we know - we rent our games, our music, our movies; we're becoming accustomed to paying for each and every use of any piece of digital entertainment. It's profit maximising for the labels, but I wonder what effect it has on the 'copyright balance'. If we're still entertaining the notion that copyright exists so that the public can get access to works through investment in what would otherwise be a public good, what happens when the benefit (access to the copyright work) is only transitory? It's not just the expiration of copyright that provides the public benefit, but also the access that the public has during the work's period commercial exploitation. When that level of access goes down (because we're now renting, not buying a book), and the returns on investment of the labels goes up (because we're paying every month, and they can extract nearly the entirety of the consumer surplus), then is the 'balance' still justified? How much does either side of the equation have to shift before we either (a) have a serious examination of copyright term and the substantial content of the exclusive rights; or (b) give up this whole 'balance' discourse?
~~DISCUSSION:closed~~