Software, books, magazines, music, movies - if you can pack it into bits, you should be able to sell the thing itself over a network. And the Internet provides an unbelievably awesome distribution network. Not quite . It remains much tougher to sell digital goods over the Internet than any reasonable businessperson should suppose, and the vast majority of content plays online are advertising-supported. I don't think it has so much to do with the inconvenience of copyright-protected formats.
Software suffers the same fate online .
Part of the problem is that downloading multimegabyte programs and other content over a modem takes forever. This attitude is incredibly frustrating to any purveyor of digital content. Consumers might be more willing to pay for digital content today. However, the Internet wouldn't have been adopted nearly as quickly. The question of the cost of purely digital goods reminds me of a parable about a hungry beggar in a street market.