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cory doctorow
Having to compete with free copies handed from user to user
makes life harder — hasn’t it always?
But it is most assuredly possible. Look at Apple’s wildly pop-
ular iTunes Music Store, which has sold over one billion tracks
since 2003. Every song on iTunes is available as a free download
from user-to-user, peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa. Indeed, the
P2P monitoring company Big Champagne reports that the aver-
age time-lapse between an iTunes-exclusive song being offered
by Apple and that same song being offered on P2P networks is
180 seconds
.
Every iTunes customer could readily acquire every iTunes song
for free, using the fastest-adopted technology in history. Many
of them do (just as many fans photocopy their favorite stories
from magazines and pass them around to friends). But Apple has
figured out how to compete well enough by offering a better ser-
vice and a better experience to realize a good business out of this.
(Apple also imposes ridiculous licensing restrictions, but that’s a
subject for a future column.)
Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the
future. It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world
where readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated
as “licensees” instead of customers.
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