Ted Nelson proposes the idea of "transcopyright." I'll ask him for a
pointer to his own description, but basically the idea is for publishers
to copyright things, but with permission given to *refer to* the material by
URL. Then it's between the original publisher's and readers' computers to
negotiate payment before any quoted material is delivered.
The cool thing here is that it's purely a legal permissions idea, like
Gnu Public License and Shareware are, and the technical details can be
ironed out by different people trying different things.
Of course it does rely on the legal/moral idea of copyright.
Another idea is to scrap copyright and royalty and go to a prepayment
scheme for information. Here, a creator of information is paid
a lump sum based on the expected revenue from distributing what he's
coming up with. I saw a funny enlightening talk by Eric Hughes called "A
Robust System for Copyright Enfringement", which started out talking about
ways info-pirates could carry on safely and profitably in public, and
segued into how information creators could use the same methods to
distribute and be paid for their work. He goes into how the money to
produce movies is raised ahead of time, with arrangements like non-
delivery insurance, etc., as a partial model for financing any kind of
information production and distribution.
--Steve
-- sw@tiac.net http://www.tiac.net/users/sw "It just keeps going and going and therefore you yourself have to keep going and going." --Energizer Bunny researcher