www.lcdmo.com/hollister.php The Revolt of the Poor

But they are faced with three inexorable processes which arelikely to render their efforts vain:
A lot of ink has been spilt regarding this important trend. Theremoval of layers of brokering and intermediation - mainly onthe manufacturing and marketing levels - is a [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] historicdevelopment (though the continuation of a long term trend).
I published one book the traditional way - and another on theInternet. In 50 months, I have received 6500 written responsesregarding my electronic book. Well over 500,000 people read it(my Link Exchange meter registered c. 2,000,000 impressionssince November 1998). It is a textbook (in psychopathology) -and 500,000 readers is [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] a lot for this kind of publication. I amso satisfied that I am not sure that I will ever consider atraditional publisher again. Indeed, my last book was publishedin the very same way.
This is the theory. But the facts are tellingly different. Theless the cost of production (brought down by digitaltechnologies) - the fiercer the battle against piracy. Thebigger the market - the more pressure is applied to clamp downon samizdat entrepreneurs.
Consider a publishing house.
Two developments threaten the future of intellectual propertyrights. One is the Internet. Academics, fed up with themonopolistic practices of professional publications - alreadypublish on the web in [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] big numbers. I published a few book on theInternet and they can be freely downloaded by anyone who has acomputer or a modem. The full text of electronic magazines,trade journals, billboards, professional publications, andthousands of books is available online. Hackers even made sitesavailable from which it is possible to download whole softwareand multimedia products. It is very easy and cheap to publish onthe Internet, the barriers to entry are virtually nil. Web pagesare hosted free of charge, and authoring and publishing softwaretools [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] are incorporated in most word processors and browserapplications. As the [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] Internet acquires more impressive sound andvideo capabilities it will proceed to threaten the monopoly ofthe record companies, the movie studios and so on.
Secondly, the Internet is a huge (200 million people), trulycosmopolitan market, with its own marketing channels freelyavailable to all. Even by default, with a minimum investment,the likelihood of being seen by surprisingly large numbers ofconsumers is high.
Consider music for instance. Streaming audio on the internet ordownloadable MP3 files will render the CD obsolete. The internetalso provides a venue for the marketing of niche products andreduces the barriers to entry previously imposed by the need toengage in costly marketing ("branding") campaigns andmanufacturing activities.
The demise of intellectual property has lately become abundantlyclear. The old intellectual property industries are fightingtooth and nail to preserve their monopolies (patents,trademarks, copyright) and their cost advantages inmanufacturing and marketing.
The relative advantage of the intellectual property corporationdoes not consist exclusively in its technological prowess.Rather it lies in its vast pool of capital, its marketing clout,market positioning, sales organization, and distribution network.
Governments, from China to Macedonia, are introducingintellectual property laws (under pressure from rich worldcountries) and enforcing them belatedly. But where one factoryis closed on shore (as has been the case in mainland China) -two sprout off shore (as is the case in Hong Kong and inBulgaria).
A book which costs 50,000 DM to produce with a potentialaudience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are likethis) - would have to be priced at a a minimum of 100 DM torecoup only the direct costs. If illegally copied (therebyshrinking the potential market as some people will prefer to buythe cheaper illegal copies) - its price would have to go upprohibitively to recoup costs, thus driving out potentialbuyers. The story is different if a book costs 10,000 DM toproduce and is priced at 20 DM a copy with a potentialreadership of 1,000,000 readers. Piracy (illegal copying) shouldin this case be more readily tolerated as a marginal phenomenon.
Intellectual property rights - despite their noble title - areless about the intellect and more about property. This is BigMoney: the markets in intellectual property outweigh the totalindustrial production in the world. The aim is to secure amonopoly on a specific work. This is an especially grave matterin academic publishing where small- circulation magazines do notallow their content to be quoted or published even fornon-commercial purposes. The monopolists of knowledge andintellectual products cannot allow competition anywhere in theworld - because theirs is a world market. A pirate in Skopje isin direct competition with Bill Gates. When he sells a piratedMicrosoft product - he is depriving Microsoft not only of itsincome, but of a client (=future income), of its monopolisticstatus (cheap copies can be smuggled into other markets), and ofits competition-deterring image (a major monopoly preservingasset). This is a threat which Microsoft cannot tolerate. Henceits efforts to eradicate piracy - successful in China and anutter failure in legally-relaxed Russia.
This model - adopted earlier by radio and television - rules theinternet now and will rule the wireless internet in the future.Content will be made available free of all pecuniary charges.The consumer will pay by providing his personal data(demographic data, consumption patterns and preferences and soon) and by being exposed to advertising. Subscription basedmodels are bound to fail.
In a fragmented market with a myriad of mutually exclusivemarket niches, consumer preferences and marketing and saleschannels - economies of scale in manufacturing and distributionare meaningless. Narrowcasting replaces broadcasting, masscustomization replaces mass production, a network of shiftingaffiliations replaces the rigid owned-branch system. Thedecentralized, intrapreneurship-based corporation is a lateresponse to these trends. The mega-corporation of the future ismore likely to act as a collective of start-ups than as ahomogeneous, uniform (and, to conspiracy theorists, sinister)juggernaut it once was.
But what Microsoft [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] fails to understand is that the problem lieswith its pricing policy - not with the pirates. When faced witha global marketplace, a company can adopt one of two policies:either to adjust the price of its products to a world average ofpurchasing power - or to use discretionary differential pricing(as pharmaceutical companies were forced to do in Brazil andSouth Africa). A Macedonian with an average monthly income of160 USD clearly cannot afford to buy the Encyclopaedia EncartaDeluxe. In America, 50 USD is the income generated in 4 hours ofan average job. In Macedonian terms, therefore, the Encarta is20 times more expensive. Either the price should be lowered inthe Macedonian market - or an average world price should befixed which will reflect an average global purchasing power.
The second development is also technological. The oft-vindicatedMoore's law predicts the doubling of computer memory capacityevery 18 months. But memory is only one aspect of computingpower. Another is the rapid simultaneous advance on alltechnological fronts. Miniaturization and concurrent empowermentby software tools have made it possible for individuals toemulate much larger scale organizations successfully. A singleperson, sitting at home with 5000 USD worth of equipment canfully compete with the best products of the best printing housesanywhere. CD-ROMs can be written on, stamped and copied inhouse. A complete music studio with the latest in digitaltechnology has been condensed to the dimensions of a singlechip. This will lead to personal publishing, personal musicrecording, and the to the digitization of plastic art. But thisis only one side of the story.
Market Fragmentation
But this defies logic: the market today is global, the costs ofproduction are lower (with the exception of the music and filmindustries), the marketing channels more numerous (half of theincome of movie studios emanates from video cassette sales), thespeedy recouping of the investment virtually guaranteed.Moreover, piracy thrives in very poor markets in which thepopulation would anyhow not have paid the legal price. Theillegal product is inferior to the legal copy (it comes with noliterature, warranties or support). So why should the bigmanufacturers, publishing houses, record companies, softwarecompanies and fashion houses worry?
Thus, content creators will benefit only by sharing in theadvertising cake. They will find it increasingly difficult toimplement the old models of royalties paid for access or ofownership of intellectual property.
Nowadays, anyone can print a visually impressive book, using theabove-mentioned cheap equipment. But in an age of informationglut, it is the marketing, the media campaign, the distribution,and the sales that determine the economic outcome.
Economically and rationally, we should expect that the costliera work of art is to produce and the narrower its market - themore emphasized its intellectual property rights.
Print newspapers offer package deals of cheap content subsidizedby advertising. In other words, the advertisers pay for contentformation and generation and the reader has no choice but beexposed to commercial messages as he or she studies the content.
This trend is also likely to restore the balance between artistand the commercial exploiters of his product. The verydefinition of "artist" will expand to include [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] all creativepeople. One will seek to distinguish oneself, to "brand" oneselfand to auction off one's services, ideas, [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] products, designs,experience, etc. This is a return to pre-industrial times whenartisans ruled the economic scene. Work stability will vanishand work mobility will increase in a landscape of shiftingallegiances, head hunting, remote collaboration and similarlabour market trends.
The answer lurks in history. Intellectual property is arelatively new notion. In the near past, no one consideredknowledge or the fruits of creativity (art, design) as"patentable", or as someone's "property". The artist was but amere channel through which divine grace flowed. Texts,discoveries, inventions, works of art and [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] music, designs - allbelonged to the community and could be replicated freely. True,the chosen ones, the conduits, were honoured but were rarelyfinancially rewarded. They were commissioned to produce theirworks of art and were salaried, in most cases. Only with theadvent of the Industrial Revolution were the embryonicprecursors [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] of intellectual property introduced but they werestill limited to industrial designs and processes, mainly asembedded in machinery. The patent was born. The more massive themarket, the more sophisticated the sales and marketingtechniques, the bigger the financial stakes - the larger loomedthe issue of intellectual property. It spread from machinery todesigns, processes, books, newspapers, any printed matter, worksof art and music, films (which, at their beginning were notconsidered art), software, software embedded in hardware,processes, business methods, and even unto genetic material.
Three years ago I published a book of short stories in Israel.The publishing house belongs to Israel's leading (andexceedingly wealthy) newspaper. I signed a contract which statedthat I am entitled to receive 8% of the income from the sales ofthe book [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] after commissions payable to distributors, shops, etc.A few months later (1997), I won the coveted Prize of theMinistry of [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] Education (for short prose). The prize money (a fewthousand DMs) was snatched by the publishing house on the legalgrounds that all the money generated by the book belongs to thembecause they own the copyright.
But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very limitedgroup of authors who actually live by their pen. Only selectmusicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation (most ofthem rock stars who own their labels - George Michael had tofight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come close toderiving subsistence level income from their profession. Allthese can no longer be thought of as mostly creative people.Forced to defend their intellectual property rights and theinterests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Schwarzeneggerand Grisham are businessmen at least as much [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] as they are artists.
This advantage, however, is also being eroded.
First, there is a psychological shift, a reaction to thecommercialization of intellect and spirit. Creative people arerepelled by what they regard as an oligarchic establishment ofinstitutionalized, lowest common denominator art and they arefighting back.
In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses,the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like this:if the rights to intellectual property were not defined andenforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on therisks associated with publishing books, recording records, andpreparing multimedia products. As a result, creative people willhave suffered because they will have found no way to make theirworks accessible to the public. Ultimately, it is the publicwhich pays the price of piracy, goes the [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] refrain.
The Newspaper Packaging
Disintermediation
Something must be done about it not only from the economic pointof view. Intellectual products are very price sensitive andhighly elastic. Lower prices will be more than compensated forby a much higher sales volume. There is no other way to explainthe pirate industries: [url=http://www.robot-cn.net/bbs/home.php?mod=space&uid=25929][/url] evidently, at the right price a lot ofpeople are willing to buy these products. High prices are animplicit trade-off favouring small, elite, select, rich worldclientele. This raises a moral issue: are the children ofMacedonia less worthy of education and access to the latest inhuman knowledge and creation?

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