[johngunderman]

This article relates to what I believe will be a hugely important economic issue in the next 50 years: the ease of ownership, especially in digital media. We are seeing this now with legal markets, such as that of OSS, and illegal markets, such as music/movie piracy. As long as the ease of creating new copies of digital information remains practically nil, it will drive out capitalism in that sector. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen, seeing as how capitalism is not built for such low variable cost markets. However, it is certain to have drastic effects on our future economy. If capitalism fails in that sector, it will cause an economic crash unless dealt with appropriately. Imagine a world with free music/movies. What incentive do these artists have to continue? Now you may argue that OSS works, so why wouldn't entertainment? The difference is that OSS has an extremely low fixed cost AND variable cost. That is to say it does not cost much at all to produce the first unit of OSS, and it becomes cheaper to produce each new "unit" of OSS. Also, many OSS contributors contribute so in their free time. They do not contribute as a primary source of income (for the most part). For the entertainment industry, which can have exorbitant fixed costs (millions of dollars for most films), the failure of capitalism will cause drastic shrinkage of the sector. While the shrinkage in itself is not neccissarily bad, the fact that it will occur so quickly will cause mass layoffs and general unstability of the economy. Where we go from there, nobody knows.

Well, I guess I rambled a bit there, but I hope that made sense :-)