A Looming “Tragedy of the Online Video Commons”

Forrester Research’s Peter Kim posts the following: when will fame alone not be enough for CGM? As more people see opportunities for fame AND fortune – via sites like Revver, fake videos like lonelygirl15, or billboards for Court TV, is there a “tragedy of the CGM commons” in the making?

The tragedy of the commons (see Wikipedia) term derives originally from a parable published by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 book on population.

Summarized: Free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately dooms the resource through over-exploitation. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals, each of which is motivated to maximise his or her own use of the resource, while the costs of exploitation are distributed between all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than those who are exploiting it.

Someone more poetic and deep than I (and you know who you are) needs to make a video analogy of this and how it applies to online video.