Well, my feeling on that is that our best hope is going to be technological - basically, something like an open DRM and micropayments technology that is robust, secure, and as portable as the .jpeg.

Digitalism makes content that costs effectively zero possible - and when content costs nothing, content businesses are going to find themselves drowned in a sea of copies.

The problem with existing drms is that they are closed and unreliable. Nobody can trust them, and they tend to be too hardware or software dependent.

But if we could develop a drm that worked, that was fast and totally relaibel and opensource so that it could be ported to every kind of machine, browser, and viewer - that would be the killer ap of the next age of the internet.

Combine that with a real and workable micropayments system and we have the foundation of a new planetary economy.

But - we are no closer to that, apparently, than we were when this idea was first bandied about in the cypherpunks mailist in the 90s.

With a true open drm, the best copies of created content could be protected, while lower quality ones were released at lower costs or for free as advertising aids.