Would a centralized store to buy copyrighted material be a good idea? I don’t know how having such a store would be fathomable. A very powerful company or organization would have to run it, like the government, which would make people hate it automatically. It would be an easy way to determine who bought and downloaded what, but there would be no competition. All ebooks would be buying their books from the same store; there would be no pricing differences for companies to outbid against each other; all music would be sold through one company instead of many different record labels. One entity would own all distribution rights to everything in the world. I don’t think this sounds very good, do you?
On a lighter note, since we are talking about ebooks and such, here is a video of an iPad being microwaved! ps. it explodes!!!!
I think that a little bit of competition amongst companies is healthy and I think that if only one organization was in control, they would have too much power and it would be a monopoly.
This would surely remove a great deal of competition, which naturally sounds like a bad thing. However, one could see a similar event with the Itunes store. It would be interesting to see what major music corporations have to say about this application. After all, many would agree that it made music distribution much easier.
I think the government has enough trouble handling their actual responsibilities that giving the power and responsibility of running a centralized copyright store would be disastrous. The idea of a monopolized system also sounds terrifying because the consumers would be at the will (and pricing) of the monopolist. Our current system certainly has its faults, but I don’t think a monopoly as an alternative would be the way to go.
The main problem with this is there is no competition. If there is no competition then this super company would be able to raise the prices as much as they want. It is an interesting idea but if it were to be enacted would probably be a disaster.