That’s brilliant! Thanks.

-JP

Just checking; are you looking into Scott McCloud’s proposals, set forth here and here? He’s done a lot of thinking on the topic of micropayments and if you haven’t already contacted him, I strongly recommend doing so.

Hi Aaron:

I’m pretty sure I’m not “making the common confusion” to which you point, but I’m not altogether certain what you mean. Please see p. 14 of the Introduction of Terry Fisher’s forthcoming book, Promises to Keep, for a brief description of what we mean <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/PTKIntroduction.pdf>. The short form is that we’re studying a series of possible directions in which the legal environment might move over the next 3 – 5 years. One possibility is to take seriously the claim of copyright holders that copyrights are indeed property rights and should be viewed as such under the law (i.e., roughly analogous to the legal treatment of real property or personal property). As I think your comment suggests, the current legal regime does not treat copyrights in this manner. The public utility scenario that we are studying takes this premise as a possible jumping-off point as well.

-JP

What do you mean by “taking property rights seriously”? As far as I can tell there are no property rights affected by Internet music sharing. Are you making the common confusion of a property right in a copyright (which can be bought and sold) with a property right in an expression (which canot)?