[ARSCLIST] Infinite digital storage

["Schooley, John" <John.Schooley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I found this blog posting on "Freedom to Tinker" by Ed Felten.  He's a
Princeton computer science professor, and thought it might interest
readers of this list.
 
I don't know about infinite, I know "Moore's law" isn't really a law at
all and at some point the ceiling will be reached.  But the amount of
digital storage available is still sure to increase in ever-ridiculous
amounts.  The 80 gig ipod I bought last year has already been eclipsed
by one with nearly double the capacity.  What will we see in a decade?
 
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1210

Infinite Storage for Music <http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1210> 


October 8th, 2007 by Ed Felten 


Last week I spoke on a panel called "The Paradise of Infinite Storage",
at the "Pop [Music] and Policy" conference at McGill University in
Montreal. The panel's title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in
the next decade, we'll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and
holds all of the music ever recorded by humanity.

This is a simple consequence of Moore's Law which, in one of its
variants, holds that the amount of data storage available at a fixed
size and price roughly doubles every eighteen months. Extrapolate that
trend and, depending on your precise assumptions, you'll find the magic
date falls somewhere between 2011 and 2019. From then on, storage
capacity might as well be infinite, at least as far as music is
concerned.

This has at least two important consequences. First, it strains even
further the economics of the traditional music business. The gap between
the number of songs you might want to listen to, and the number you're
willing and able to pay a dollar each to buy, is growing ever wider. In
a world of infinite storage you'll be able to keep around a huge amount
of music that is potentially interesting but not worth a dollar (or even
a dime) to you yet. So why not pay a flat fee to buy access to
everything?

Second, infinite storage will enable new ways of building filesharing
technologies, which will be much harder for copyright owners to fight.
For example, today's filesharing systems typically have users search for
a desired song by contacting strangers who might have the song, or who
might have information about where the song can be found. Copyright
owners' technical attacks against filesharing often target this search
feature, trying to disrupt it or to exploit the fact that it involves
communication with strangers.

But in a world of infinite storage, no searching is needed, and
filesharers need only communicate with their friends. If a user has a
new song, it will be passed on immediately to his friends, who will pass
it on to their friends, and so on. Songs will "flood" through the
population this way, reaching all of the P2P system's participants
within a few hours - with no search, and no communication with
strangers. Copyright owners will be hard pressed to fight such a system.

Just as today, many people will refuse to use such technologies. But
pressure on today's copyright-based business models will continue to
intensify. Will we see new legal structures? New business models? Or new
public attitudes? Something has to change.