The author is ignoring a very fundamental concept: Ideas are as cheap as the transmission medium
20 years ago, the two cheapest ways to mass-transmit ideas were television and newspapers. With the Television, advertising dollars allowed the user to buy the connection and get content for free. The newspaper model required the consumer to buy both the content AND the supply chain, but the costs were low enough and advantages large enough that newspapers prospered.
Now we have the Internet, and content follows the Television cost model. Ideas have little markup now - server costs, bandwidth, and time. And time isn't even worth that much! If you demand the user to pay you for your time, you're up against thousands of people screaming on their own soap boxes for free. Are you really offering something so special that someone couldn't get it on a site sponsored by advertising?
The future WILL be free because sites have already figured out how to monetize free with advertising money. If the dead-tree papers can't figure it out soon, they're going to find themselves with a big paywall and no eyeballs. For instance, it's very telling that Murdoch sites still show their 'paywall' content if you're referred by Google News
You don't resolve Brand's maxim by going wholly from one side to wholly the other side. Copies should be practically free, it is the effort to produce that is not.
Articles like this half realise that something has changed, that something is failing in the copyright-oriented way of funding production. But what is their conclusion? "Let's pretend it is not real, let's just go back to how things used to be." -- ultimately they completely fail to understand or adjust.
There is a simple fact: The benefit of the internet and the mechanism of copyright are severely, fundamentally, inescapably conflicted. What copyright restrains is exactly the good the internet offers. The intelligent thing to do is devise other ways of supporting production, better suited to the realities.
It's like the print media somehow failed to notice the appearance of television and radio. Advertiser supported media started long before the internet.
When I buy the dead-tree version of my local newspaper, I have no expectation that it should be free. If I pick it up and walk out of the coffee shop without paying, that's stealing. But when I walk upstairs to my office and log on to the Web site for the same paper, I feel a divine right to access the entirety of that paper—and 10 years of its archives—for free
That's a straw man. Even today, we might expect to see todays news and the past month news for free - but stuff like archive access and feature content is often behind pay-walls.
As long as the marginal cost of something can be covered by advertising, lead generation etc. it'll tend to be free. I'm pretty sure that the breakthrough of a simple micro-payment system would help generate so much income that it'll cause more content to be free (since there's more income to cover the marginal cost).
That's not true, you wouldn't expect them to deliver a past newspaper to your house for free. You might expect to be able to access them from libraries, but your argument gets hazy then as libraries also have today's paper for free too. And they're NOT free, they're paid for by your taxes and your time in having to go to the library.
I also think that the only reason papers are charging for archive access and feature content online is because it's a desperate bid to monetize as they're forced to give away news for free, so I'm not sure you can really say he's created a straw man to attack at all.
Fantasy island nonsense. How are they going to lockup all that data, magical fairy dust? The genie is out of the bottle, as much as newsweek wishes this were 1950 it's not. It's fine and dandy that this guy expects to pay on these new devices. The reality is they are just computers and they will only remain tied up in proprietary software for so long. I expect I'll get hold of all the data I want for free on my computer just like I always have. I expect I will only use devices where I can run arbitrary code and I expect after they get tired of paying, the rest of the world will catch up.
the age when writers wrote for money is over (if it was ever here) Sure, for some, the pittance they are paid makes the difference between needing a dayjob and not, but I think as distribution of writing approaches free, you will see more and more of the writers who are writing for fame rather than money (like myself) publishing directly for free.
Now, I went through a conventional publisher for my last book, and I think they earned their money; they helped a whole lot with editing, and they got the book into nearly every suitable store that I've sampled (I'm so tickled when I go to fry's and see my book on the shelf)
but I never expected (and the publisher never promised) that i'd make anything like reasonable money off it. I didn't take an advance, so my co-author and I split 15% of the wholesale price (1/2 of the cover price) the first run was 4000 books, and the information therein has a short shelf life (it's not obsolete yet, but it will be in a year)
For the second edition, I'm kinda toying with the idea of releasing a free 'e-copy' in text or PDF after we've passed X revenue (Sure, I'm not doing this for the money, but the publisher is, and having them onboard and engaged results in more credibility for me.)
You know this article makes me ponder the Steve Jobs 'Reality Distortion Field'. The author is right, if I go to, say, any internet music site like Pandora for instance. I really do feel like I am being slighted if it is not free. And at the same time I actually give Steve my credit card details, IN ADVANCE, because I may want to download the very same music from his site. I would never dream of paying a dime to Pandora. Yet I pay Steve and think, wow, he's doing me a favor! Look at all this great stuff! And so convenient!
I don't have a good idea of how many other people do this, but I imagine it is a lot. Perhaps the secret to a good business model in the digital age is to replicate Steve's 'Reality Distortion Field'. Because, as one of the suckers, I can tell you it really does work.
It's strange how things work out. I used to use Macs, but recently switched back to Linux. Shortly after, I paid for Pandora One.
It's all about what's most useful to you. I would listen to Pandora way more than 40 hours a month if I could, and now I can. When I had less free time for messing around with my OS and trying to get stuff to work, I wanted a Mac, but now that I have a regular job, trying to get stuff to work at home is fun again, so back to Linux it is.
Whoah this guy is taking entirely too much credit for the freevolution. If I recall, media companies did not example jump head over heels at the chance to buy into the vision of these young new media hypesters.
The phenomenon of giving everything away was largely confined to startups, most of which failed, some of which settled for meager profits compared to traditional companies, and a few of which (Google, Facebook) generated revenue models and brand equity that would be the envy of any news organization.
I do think he's right that the pendulum has been swinging away from free recently, but that's only because it's now becoming clearer what business models work as free and what don't. And even today, a lot more works as free than used to.
It depends. Media as insipid as Newsweek will have trouble competing against the in-depth analysis around us. The Advocate is going to have trouble competing because the news in the gay community is better distributed by AmericaBlog and Bilerico, the interest stories are by individual bloggers sharing their stories and linked through aggregation sites, and all that's left is celebrity gossip (covered by Perez Hilton if you want.)
We still need people covering the news, the basic fact gathering. However, facts aren't copyrightable. The rest is opinion, and it's just not as expensive anymore.
You couldn't walk into the (most) cafeterias, start reading the paper and then walk out without buying anything. After a couple of days you'll be told to go away.
They bought it to add to the attraction of going to the cafeteria. And it costs you to read it, even if it is a cup of tea, which is probably even more expensive than the paper.
When I take a photo with my film camera, I don't expect to get it developed for free ... then cameras went digital.
When I ask a musician to fill my house with music, I don't expect him to do it for free ... then came radio (and then recordings, etc, etc)
Technology can remove limitations.