Malcolm Gladwell has a review of Free: The Future of A Radical Price by Chris Anderson in the New Yorker. The review is a very thoughtful meditation on what it might mean to say content is “free,” and very worth a read. It begins:
At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted.
Whether you are working hard to produce a newspaper, working hard to post a quality blog, working hard to produce a readable book, working hard to make a movie, or working hard to record a performance of any other kind, there is a problem in finding a way to get fair compensation for the work you are doing. Once your work finds its way to the internet, it is simply there for the taking. If there is no way for the person or organization that produces the work to be fairly compensated, the long range effect will be to end that production and discourage any production that might take its place. Then everybody loses.
It has been long and truthfully said: There is no free lunch, at least not for very long.
NMC hasn’t had an Open Thread in a while, so I’ll post this here. Chico Harris
of Oxford was interviewed this morning on Mississippi Edition by Karen Brown. I
believe he is a regular poster here.
F Amazon.
I agree with Kingfish on this one.
What is the value of yesterday’s news?
Nobody goes broke chargin’ too much.
Ben, that’s not what the Dr. “Hell On Wheels” Wood taught us in Econ 201 & 202. The Supply & Demand Curve is variable with time and the desire for additional consumption of a good at a given price (price elasticity). It’s entirely possible to sell not one unit of a good if the price is too high (or too cheap).
Wait til you see what Judge Posner proposes.
The cash strapped news media is now resorting to pimping/prostitution (figuratively) for additional cash —check this out:
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/07/02/wapo-a-wapimp/
The less than arms-length relationship between much of the national press and the White House is already very uncomfortable and troubling. If the government bails them out, then we will have, for the first time, official state run media. God help us.
Speaking of media, AFOTL, there is an interesting CBS post about Sarah Palin’s disagreements with the McCain campaign’s handling of her husband’s fringe nut efforts to have Alaska secede from the other 49 United States at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/07/01/politics/main5128672.shtml and another at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/30/politics/politico/main5126634.shtml?tag=pop
After a couple of more years of the current bullshit we are seeing from DC, I’ll be ready to join in secession efforts for MS. Where do I sign up?
AFOTL: other geniuses beat you to the punch with the secession idea. They weren’t men enough to make it a success. Neither will you.
Speaking of free info…Ding, dong the witch is dead, and oh, by the way…Did you hear ” no more politics as usual” …Damn, thank god for that.
If Mississippi seceded and walked away from federal dollars, we’d be Paraguay or worse in no time.
But if we could take about 12-13 delta counties in Mississippi, and a similar number from the Arkansas delta, and form them into the 51st state, Mississippi and Arkansas would vault from the bottom of every state ranking to about 14-18th, or thereabouts. The 51st state would get its own federal judges and Congresspeople and all the other accoutrements of statehood. That’s a motion. Do I have a second?