ideas that are timeless but possible only in this time. But regardless of their
character, they were enabled by the environment of innovation of the origi-
nal Net.

/tab\/tab\NEW MARKETS/tab\/tab\

New products beget new markets. And new modes of distribution (in-
cluding the removal of barriers to distribution) induce the creation of new
markets for existing products as well.

Consider just one example: the production of poetry. The market for po-
etry is extremely small; the burden in getting poems published is excep-
tionally great. These real-space constraints translate into an extraordinarily
difficult market for poets.

But using both the cheap distribution of the Internet and tools for better
structuring the delivery of content, the market for poetry on the Internet has
taken off. There has been an explosion of sites dedicated to producing and
distributing poetry. Poetry Daily, for example, launched in 1997, receives
over 150,000 visitors a month. At peak usage, 12,000 users come to the site
per day. And over 16,000 subscribe to a regular content newsletter.[8-9]

These sites are not simply tools for delivering poems more cheaply. Their
technology also enables better control over how that content is consumed.
Some sites have technologies for guiding the reading of poetry -- thereby
making it accessible to or understandable by a much wider audience.[8-10]
Others enable the audio reading of poetry, similarly enabling a market for
the blind that otherwise would have been restricted.[8-11] These tools in turn
expand the reach of this form of creativity to people who otherwise would
not consume this poetry.

/tab\/tab\NEW MEANS OF DISTRIBUTION/tab\/tab\

The most dramatic potential for affecting creativity is, as Coase described
earlier, the lowering of the transaction costs of distribution, and hence the
expansion of the extent of the market. Here there are a number of well-
known examples that we will consider again when we examine changes in
copyright law and their effects on the Net.

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