[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do," written for a symposium called "Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I'd serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]
When I say the new technologies will shift power to listeners, I mean of course listeners who can afford the new technologies. But what about consumers who can't buy a computer, a digital recorder, a printer, a cbook, and an infobahn hookup?
Music: Poor consumers should benefit from electronic music delivery. Even if they can't afford the hardware, they should be able to buy their music from public vending machines. While it may cost more to buy from these machines than it would to buy from home, it should still cost less than it does now. Of course consumers will still need devices that play these recordings, but there's no reason to think they'll end up costing more than about what CD players do now.
