Since I was handing out royal titles last week I thought it might be fun to consider what J.D. Lasica might deserve for Darknet.

NOTE: That's the royal crown magnolia from mytho-fleurs.com. Like it? It's yours.

A long evening spent reading Lasica's book brought the title to me: King of Irony.

Remember, this is a book. Thus it is subject both to a book's business model and its rights regime.

Want a copy? $25.95 plus tax and (if you buy it online) shipping get it for you. Or wait for it to appear at your local library. Or borrow one from a friend, free. Or wait some months for it to appear in a discount bin, or a remainder lot, or a garage sale. The price you pay is a function is a function of the time you're willing to wait for it.

What can you do with this book? I typed an excerpt today by hand. The length of the excerpt, again, is a function of time, and the cost of my time to produce it, unless I want to string it out a page or two. In that case, technology might be deployed -- a scanner -- plus a few minutes with the scanner's OCR software, some cutting-and-pasting, and voila!

Want to steal some more? Production costs are going to get you. A Xerography process may give you a bound book for just a few dollars, if your order is small. An offset process costs less per book, but the order in that case must be bigger. I guarantee the printer will want to know you're a Wiley fella (or lady) before they take the order.

And we haven't even cracked the cover yet. Easy to see where Lasica's crown comes from.

The task before us, I believe, is to replicate the book's DRM in the digital world, while creating business models that will keep not only the film and music equivalents J.K. Rowling but also those of Lasica and myself in a lifestyle to which we'd like to become accustomed.

If an existing film studio, or book publisher, or record company can do this for us, we'll sign with them.

If someone else can do this, we'll sign with them.

We really don't care, we creative types. We want to create, and we want to live.

The problem is that the existing middlemen in information transactions won't go quietly. They will use the government, they will use the police, they will use anything they can get their hands on to maintain their market control.

Until we have business models which can compete with these middlemen they will stay on top.

So now you know what you have to do.