News Content As a Resource, Not a Final Product

Paul Graham has posted an essay questioning whether we ever really paid for "content," as publishers of news and music are saying while they struggle to stay afloat in the digital age. "If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?" Techdirt's Mike Masnick takes it a step further, suggesting that the content itself should be treated as a resource — one component of many that go into a final product. Masnick also discussed the issue recently with NY Times' columnist David Carr, saying that micropayments won't be the silver bullet the publishers are hoping for because consumers are inundated with free alternatives. "It's putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there's no specific benefit for paying the toll." Reader newscloud points out that the fall 2009 issue of Harvard's Nieman Reports contains a variety of related essays by journalists, technologists, and researchers.

Comments

Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth

[mangu]

Because despite it being slower, having longer queues, only being open at specific times and any money raised from that booth goes to "the man" - it's the legal route

Do you think reading news that someone paid for and is willing to give away for free is illegal?

After all, it's not as if this were something new, newspapers have been distributed for free before the internet existed. Even today, I get far more newsletters in my snail mailbox than I want to. Ad-based revenue did exist before the digital age.

All the propaganda you read about the "pirates" is just greed trying to appeal to your honesty.

I never paid for content, I paid for the convenience and the format. I have always been able to read the headlines for free at the newsstand, why should I pay to read the headlines at the internet? I listened to music for free on the radio, I only bought records that had some particular appeal for me, or to give as gifts. Why should I pay for mp3 music? I watched films for free on the TV but paid movie tickets to see the big screen, then why should I pay for a scrappy 700MB DVD rip?

Getting stuff from the internet is not unethical. I'm not consuming anything, I'm not using other people's paper, or ink, or vinyl, or theater seat. If the content creators are too stupid to find a lucrative means of revenue, it's their problem, I'm not taking anything away from them.