Exactly. So what we are thrashing out with digital rights right now sets up for the kind of future when physical goods are more about the design licenses and rights to manufacture.

Thinking in those terms, we cannot actually discount the role that digital rights management plays. What makes DRM unfair and oppressive has a bit to do with who holds enforcement powers. If the seller also manages the DRM servers, then it holds all the power and can do whatever it wants. If the seller disappears, your access disappears.

One interesting around that is having a third-party rights management. Something like using Bitcoin contracts: http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bit...

In their example, you would have bitcoin signed three way: a seller, a buyer, and a mutually-agreed-upon arbitrator. Two sides of a party can complete the transaction. If both seller and buyer agrees, then the bitcoin's ownership transfers over. If there is a disagreement, they can talk to the arbitrator.

The article also talks about other examples, for example, using technology like Bitcoin to sign a loan agreement on a car with the car as a collateral. As long as the owner is making payments for the length of the loan, the car is accessible. When the payments are in arrears, the car is not repossessed; it is locked out remotely. It will be unlocked automatically by digital contract when payment resumes. It also means you can digitally sign over the contract to someone else -- effectively, selling to someone else the rights to use the car if they can get the payments back up and running again.

Something like that would work with digital goods. I can say, hold a contract specified in a Bitcoin-like token to a book. I have the right to loan it out the book to any number of people, but I can only loan it out once. If I loan it, I register via the same p2p mechanism that such a person has the right to read it. When I want it back, I can get the book back, or have the access rights automatically expire.

It doesn't keep pirates from it. If you can read the book, you have access to the raw data, and you can pirate it. Like any social agreements, it depends on that most people will abide by this. It's an iteration on the kind of strong property laws that allows entrepreneurialism to flourish in America.

I can have something similar in a world of powerful microfabs. I purchase manufacturing rights of a design, and it is registered publicly via a p2p mechanism that is not controlled by any private interest. If I purchased the right to manufacturing 100 units, I can split it off and sell or transfer 50 manufacturing rights to someone else. If I wanted to make derivative work, I'd get a separate derivative works license, also registered via a p2p contract system.

Further, I would essentially be paying the designer the perceived value of the good, while decoupling that with the material cost to manufacture such a good. I can choose to purchase additional raw material to feed into the microfab, or I can choose to recycle something I want to get rid of, break it down into its component parts, and make this new thing that I want.

And if I didn't want to pay the perceived value, I find or develop an Open Source version.

Your comments about "A new Carnegie in a global economy" -- that is the premise for Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Personally, I think it is far more interesting not to control and be the sole supplier of the raw substance. Why do you want to control it? To be wealthy and powerful. Why do you want to be wealthy and powerful? That gets into some really interesting discussions.