Crystal Ball Gazing
Reflections on the role of information resources in a liberal arts eduction

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When pay-per-view becomes reality,
commercial materials can be web-based.

Several major companies, including most of the major banks and credit card companies, are working to develop a practical form of "cyber-cash". Once a workable arrangement becomes broadly accepted, it becomes feasible to sell web-based information on a pay-per-view basis. The cyber-cash system would deduct the viewing fee from the customer account and credit it to the information provider via an automated arrangement that will be much simpler than executing a credit-card purchase for each access.

Once pay-per-view becomes feasible, it becomes very profitable for information owners to sell their documents over the Internet. Similarly, it makes it feasible for individuals to "sell" access to writings without the use of publishers as agents to handle the logistics of distribution and fee-collection. The cyber-cash suppliers also make money by collecting a small fee from each of the millions of daily transactions.

Simply put, the volume of information available on-line will increase rapidly once there emerges a practical method to handle commercially-valuable information.

This future cyber-cash system is part of the push to copyright all forms of electronic information and to eliminate the "Fair Use" provisions. For copyright holders, fair use makes no sense in a digital world where fee-collection can be reduced to an automatic process. Indeed, it only makes the process more complex by requiring special accommodations for academic users.

Since composing this page in 1999, pay-per-view has diminished substantially as a major network initiative. Several coorporations (particularly the major credit-card companies) are continuing to develop the product, but it is clear that these products will be slow to appear on the web. One problem slowing the emergence of pay-per-view has been the lack of a broadly accepted standard for how such information would be represented within various web resources. The EDUCAUSE-sponsored Instructional Management System (IMS) is one promising approach toward such a standard.

Public resistance to web payments is a second major impediment to such technologies. Quite simply, when vendors begin charging for access to their on-line information 86% of their viewers jump to a different free site instead of agreeing to pay the posted costs -- even if the other sites may not offer the same quality or diversity of resources. This produces a market inertia that prevents payment systems until such time that most sites are ready to adopt them simultaneously (cite).


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Copyright 2001, Leo D. Geoffrion