joegratz.net

There’s Yet Another Social Networking System — but this one doubles as a library. It’s called MediaChest. Users list the books, CDs, games, and movies they’re willing to lend to other users. Instead of renting, people can borrow. (Here’s a list of the books I’ve entered, for example.) The paradigm case is friends borrowing from friends, but the potential exists to meet new people by temporarily swapping media with them over coffee. There are trust issues, certainly — inevitably, someone will abscond with a DVD every once in a while — but a built-in reputation system should keep people relatively honest.

This is precisely the sort of thing that won’t be possible in a world of “digital lockup” in which the user’s rights under the first sale doctrine are encumbered by Digital Rights Management technologies.