Recently when Apple started selling it’s thinnest laptops, I joked that it had joined Adobe in selling the Air.

A while back I read about pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing. The first one is not legal in the US, but the second one is, in many states. The main difference is, in a multi-level scheme, you have to have an actual merchantable product to sell, the sale of which generates the money. The scalable money does not come from “membership fees”, as it does in pyramid schemes.

The interesting part comes when the product is electronic. These days, it costs almost nothing to replicate an electronic product and sell it, whether it is an e-book or a computer program. Imagine making an MLM scheme based on selling an electronic product. Anyone can have rights to redistribute copies of the product, but only if they pay commissions to the person who introduced them to the program. With physical products, the manufacture and supply chain would enforce this. But with electronic products, it is enforced by copyright law. I should look into mixing MLM with copyrighted electronic materials. It costs very little to carry out, and could really take off.

You don’t need to go very far, however, to make money in interesting ways. For example, there are lots of new species being discovered all over the world, theorems being proved, etc. And often they are named after the scientists that discovered them. Well, how about I make a company that lets millionaires give a unique gift… having a dinosaur named after you. Give us $500,000 and we’ll find you a scientist willing to take $250,000 to name the next dinosaur after your wife, and it’ll get its own wikipedia article, too. And we’ll send all the journals to you. We might even throw in a cuople other things, after all, we’re getting $250 G’s.

Kind of like all these companies bottling tap water and selling it . Brilliant. Although it might make sense to buy it if you suspect the pipes in your building are dirty.