Would love to see an experiment around the effect, on the bottom line, of (for example) exposing hires images. Do sales go down as people help themselves? Do sales go up as people are impressed by the quality and want to legally use them? Does it have no real effect on sales but other effects on general exposure of your collection, museum, whatever?

Perhaps we could persuade someone to expose such data, perhaps finding some way to pay for any significant loss to be insured against, and see what happens…..

Of course, actual metrics might not be really desirable to all. Like the music industry, perhaps there is going to be a significant rear-guard action devoted to protecting existing business models for as long as possible.

There are a lot of vested interests here it seems to me – not necessarily just those directly involved in the actual court case….

Good post BTW – useful roundup of some of the issues and some useful comments besides.

Paul