In-House Counsel

Radiohead's Great Experiment

LONDON, UK - While policy makers spend a great deal of time on issues related to copyright in the digital age, some of those with copyrighted material to distribute are testing novel business models.

The latest, and perhaps one of the most significant, of these experiments is Radiohead's offer of their new album as a digital download on a 'pay what you think it's worth' basis. All forms of attempting to protect the digital material are set aside and, instead, the band plays to their fans' sense of fair play.

The band themselves say that they don't know how this will work out but there is certainly massive interest in it and their website has had some technical problems as a result.

It will take some time for all the lessons from the many models being tried to be worked out. What will be interesting to see is the extent to which these will continue to rely on legal measures such as copyright law or technical measures such as digital rights management.

In the meantime, enjoy the music, which should be good, and which you can legally download from here.

Full post as published by Cisco High Tech Policy Blog on October 04, 2007 (boomark / email).