How to make money when people copy your stuff

99% of everyone I’ve spoken to over the last year still doesn’t believe that anyone’s going to make any money out of peer to peer content sales over the internet. (i.e. I cheaply make some video, music, e-books or anything else and sell a copy to you directly and cheaply over the web without there being a megalithic company somewhere in the middle).

Here are some of the favourite objections to this idea in rough order of how often I hear them:

• “Won’t it all be rubbish content if it’s being made by individuals?”
• “How will you find anything good if there’s that much of it?”
• “People don’t like sitting in front of a computer to watch video” / “People like books, not reading on a screen” / “people don’t like listening to mp3’s”. (Actually suddenly people do quite like that last one!)  

I’ve written extensively on this blog about why all of the above are all red herrings. 

For me one of the genuinely hard questions to answer is about intellectual property protection. If you can make one sale of a piece of content, how do you know it’s not then being copied another 10 times?

This obviously is a real problem in the music industry at the moment (just ask anyone who’s trying to run a record label and finds their entire back catalogue freely available to download on a blog somewhere) and getting around it won’t be easy.

I think the most likely thing to happen is that as the distribution methods change, those annoyingly clever people who always seem to live in California will start to come up with inventive ideas about how to make sure people get paid for the stuff they create.

Today I found a great example in the video upload site Revver.com.

It’s extremely simple. You upload a piece of video and it becomes “Revverised” which means a small unobtrusive ad is placed onto the end of the content. Every time someone clicks it you get paid. The more it gets copied, the more you make.

Obviously this won’t work with music but for video it could be one solution. And it won’t be the only one. Certain content will sell best with certain models and we’ll see more and more inventive new models appearing over the next few years.

Maybe copying isn’t quite so bad after all!