Trend 5: Digital ownership and inheritance (among other things)

Digital Curation, passing it on, cloud owners

You buy music for your kids, then give it to the when they leave home. You die, leaving all your software, books, movies, music to your next of kin (or to charity). When your stuff consists of cached copies and permission to redownload, how does that work?

There's not any mechanism at the moment to pass your stuff from one account to another. I'm talking about Amazon and iTunes here, and they seem to be the model that everyone's copying. Expect these systems to get more mature, coping with the whole life cycle of families (births, deaths, marriages, leaving home, divorce) more explicitly than they do now.

Different formats are more amenable to transfer than others - music can all be rendered back to unprotected formats, even in iTunes, but movies and books are still fully DRM protected, as are Apps from at least the mobile app stores.

The plus side, of course, is that media was never permanent anyway, due to obsolescence, but once the process of giving it away is worked out, digital versions, especially cloud based, are liable to stay up to date (e.g. iTunes Match using the current "best" format, regardless of whether your copy is a nasty low rate MP3 from the turn of the century).

The dynamic in this market follows the now familiar "winner takes all" model common to consumer network based services. We simply don't want to manage 15 repositories of stuff, one, maybe two is enough.

I think this means Amazon first, Apple second and Google struggling.

Normal market dynamics, whereby companies fail will have a big impact, if consumer's access to their stuff relies on that companies key servers or PKI being available. I expect to see a niche for escrow of that stuff and established IT players working out how to monetize running the authorisation / DRM infrastructure of dead companies.