Copyright in the Internet Age

Online Commerce Begs For Web-Relevant Commerce Instrumentation

By Scott Moskowitz, CEO, Blue Spike, Inc.

The Internet Age is supposed to be the age of new business models but a lot of the concepts don't really offer a great deal that is absolutely novel. Subscription schemes, online jukeboxes, live performances carried on streaming media all are analogues of models that have been proven in physical space markets. To make them work online will require electronic analogues of all the commerce instrumentation that is used by physical space retailers to package, distribute, mediate and pay for these consumables.

What are those instruments? They are the unexciting but nonetheless indispensable building blocks of the new infrastructure: e-labels, e-tags, e-money, e-receipts and e-boxes that will animate, and automate, the retailing and auditing functions on the Web will make online commerce infinitely flexible and in most every way more secure than offline commerce. For the automated models of online commerce to be fully realized, vendors will have to find ways to durably embed or attach all of the labels, tags, receipts, subscription data, premiums and the transactional data that vendors and consumers create and share offline.

Digital watermarking is ideally suited to provide much of the infrastructure upon which this instrumentation will be based. Of all the technologies that can be called into play to drive commerce on the Web, digital watermarking has the unique capacity to animate business models and serve the interests of consumers while protecting the rights of copyright holders. It is, for the consumer, the least burdensome and troublesome technology to provide these key commerce mechanisms, placing all the moving parts out of their hands, working invisibly and with the lowest computational demands.

Part 1:	Market Has a Message: Make it Easy
Part 2:	Digital Watermarking Preserves Copyright Security and Transparency