Slashdot Mirror
The End of Free
The Atlantic has up an insightful piece from its print edition called Closing the Digital Frontier. Michael Hirschorn takes readers through a jaundiced version of the familiar story of the rise and dominance of the "Information wants to be free" meme, then claims that the era of freedom is now over. "...the phrase Information wants to be free... became perhaps the most powerful meme of the past quarter century; so powerful, in fact, that multibillion-dollar corporations destroyed their own businesses at its altar. ... But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. ... It’s far from a given that this shift will generate the kinds of revenue media companies are used to: for under-30s whelped on free content, the prospect of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars yearly for print, audio, and video (on expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month) is not going to be an easy sell. Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps. There’s too much potential upside."
The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out.
As Diaspora and a number of other projects are illustrating, Facebook is far from openness. The API, in my opinion, is little more than a glimpse of what actually goes on inside the behemoth that knows all.
This article seems to be spot on at times and just completely at odds with how I see things at others like:
Even so, Google still needs for the Web, however it’s accessed, to remain central—because without contextual search advertising, Google ceases to matter. Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.
(emphasis mine) How incredibly shortsighted. During the World Cup game yesterday, I used my smart phone to search for no less than five pieces of information. And what are iAds? Nothing more than a contextual advertising model based on what you've downloaded as I see it. Sounds awfully similar to Google's model.
Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.
That's not the only question, it's merely the most monetarily important. I can think of tons of questions to go with your analogy. Who are the Native Americans now? Will one "owner" arise or can multiple coexist like the farmers and ranchers? How much will the government intervene and when? After this is all hashed out will there ever be peace? When it's all said and done, what's the next frontier that will be fought over for profit or will there ever be another one?
My work here is dung.
"Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps. There’s too much potential upside."
Eh? I thought the entire drive behind the iphone and the appstore is young people... without them apple wouldnt be making money hand over fist, and not everyone and their grandma would be building apps to 'get rich quick'TM
If young people didnt care about apps, no one would make them, since there wouldnt be any benefit to doing so at all.
People, what a bunch of bastards
> But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. ...
If anything, the quoted material in the summary just emphasizes what we all probably understand (except, perhaps, for the youngest among us): that the rhythm of change is beating faster and faster as time goes on.
> Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps.
And so, it seems that there will be yet another change --- when those young people become older.
This isn't the end of anything, especially of "free", rather, it's the start of ever more rapid changes.
(and yes, I didn't read TFA)...
expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month
Wait, $30 a month for Internet service on a $300 phone or $600 tablet? Yeah, that's real steep, as opposed to, say, $30 a month for AOL on a $1,500 Windows 95 PC a decade or so ago.
The devices are actually a heck of a lot cheaper now than they were when the Internet took off. They're more capable and easier to use, too. Access is no more expensive, and it's wireless. Look for the cost - of both the devices and bandwidth - to continue to decline over time. This will help users to afford quite a bit of content, in the same way folks who cancel their cable TV can afford a Netflix subscription and a substantial number of downloads from iTunes or Amazon and still end up money ahead (and see exactly what they want to see when they want to see it).
Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.
I use my iPhone primarily for searching Google -- that's probably what I most use it for. If I'm watching a movie, reading a book, talking to someone, and I want to know some bit of information about the topic, I Google it on my phone and then view the relevant content in the browser. Of course, there is an app for that, but why would I want to install a dozen different applications (IMDB, Wikipedia etc.) when I can Google it and get the results on one page. Google is pretty good at providing what I need. I have no doubt, however, that other people use these individual apps to find the information they need. I guess it's a matter of preference.
Netcraft confirmed it.
Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps
No, but a deflationary environment can.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Eh? I thought the entire drive behind the iphone and the appstore is young people... without them apple wouldnt be making money hand over fist, and not everyone and their grandma would be building apps to 'get rich quick'TM
If young people didnt care about apps, no one would make them, since there wouldnt be any benefit to doing so at all.
You must have just skimmed the paragraph preceding your quote. The author says
They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year, than they are to subscribe to the same old kludgy Web site they have been using freely for years.
The author is making the distinct assumption that anyone under 30 years of age enjoyed or enjoys free content and therefore sees no reason to use Netflix or pay for an iPhone app. I don't know what the actual numbers are and I wish the author had included a lot more citations but the assumption is that young people pay less for applications in the mobile environment. I think that's a safe assumption just based on how much income they usually have compared to people over 30. The other assumption is that once young people enjoy free media via filesharing, they are unwilling to pay for that content via Netflix, Amazon or iTunes. I don't think that's universally true although there may be a small percentage that hold that mentality -- whether it be through an idealism or just lack of money to spend.
My work here is dung.
It seems to me that this article is completely based around the iPhone and the AT&T data plan subscriptions. Does this guy forget that desktops/notebooks will still outnumber smartphones 20k/1? Almost everyone that owns a "Smartphone" owns at least 1 (if not more) expensive desktop/notebook computers that are connecting to the internet through the cable company. Also, I get the feeling that the smartphone subscription model might just be a re-hash of what happened in the early days of the AOL-style dial-up internet. Maybe things will start up this way and open up into much more free content and services as the market grows....just like the original internet did. Horrible article.
If you want to know why the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying, it is because the Internet has been taken over by business interests; the original network of academics and hackers is just a tiny fraction of what the Internet has now become. Most of the people on the Internet have no interest in freedom, they just want to go to some large business' website and do whatever it is that they do there.
Palm trees and 8
shouldn't they have some sort of disclosure that they are in the 'information wants to be subscribed to business' that is being threatened by the 'information wants to be free' thing
You can have the source.
http://meego.com/downloads
What's happening in fact is the proprietary mobile telcos are under pressure from all directions. Google and even more significantly, Nokia. Apple.... yeah... well...
The Internet is still there. The PC is still there. You now have all that moving mobile. It's more, not less.
Deleted
Every single media provider who started to charge for content has lost out. New York Times is a great example. They've had to reduce prices again and again and again and still have trouble.
The second a news story is out, someone reproduces it. It's no longer about content ownership, it's who can get it out, correct and in a format people like FIRST.
Look at music... who won that one? Itunes. They got it out in a method and format faster and better than anyone. Now... admittedly there might have been better services but they didn't offer the library that itunes can. (I hate itunes before anyone passes judgment).
What the market is proving is that people have a threshold for payment on content. The majority of us it's around $10 for movies (that's when sales peak in numbers other than first release) on DVD's, for music it's around $15 for a full CD, 75 to 99 cents for an individual song... and so on. News media, it's 0. There are a small few of us that then replicate this news (to the media companies horror) to the wide audiences. The author things this will stop... and of course has no true understanding of the market.
Information is easier to share than at any other point in history. News is replicated and spread in seconds now, and people, not just the young kids, are used to it for FREE. The only way this "may" be possible is if every single news media group put up walls at the same time... AND noone found a way to bypass this. It's just not feasible.
The most impact this can possible have is a lag in news release in the hours. It's like the RIAA... it's an antiquated business model that doesn't work anymore. The times have changed so that content en masse is no longer valuable, just the content itself. Good news, strong stories... well written... that's what matters now.
Welcome to the 21st century.
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone,
Most people don't have a smartphone. Most people have a basic mobile where you press a few buttons and talk to people - that's all. Until of if that changes, the massive bulk of the personal comuting iceberg will remain on desktop and laptop computers. That's where free software will retain it's natural lead, no matter what happens to the small (but significant in it's own way) proportion of smartphone users.
We should not get carried away by the hype from the manufacturers of these closed, locked down and heavily restricted devices. While they have a place, the vast bulk of applications - both free and paid-for will remain where the vast bulk of the users are: using devices with screens at least the size of a sheet of paper and with input devices that are usable for the mass creation of content. That's the main reason why PDAs failed to take off and is the main stopper behind smartphoens getting mass appeal. When they do, the free apps will follow.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
... Think Again.
The only reason that you enjoyed what you had before is that there wasn't the content distribution network of the internet. It was very narrow. Newsagents had limited shelves, Satellite companies had limited numbers of channels. It was only because of limited options that you could do what you could do.
What did the monks who hand wrote books do after Gutenberg? Probably stopped hand writing books, mostly. Once anyone could write their own books, you didn't need people to write it for you.
Instead of this piece of fluff (which should have been titled "The End of Freedom"), it's better to re-read The Right to Read by RMS: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html. He saw this coming back in 1997.
'The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995'
I guess this is a bit far-fetched, but I wonder if it would be possible to design a phone that could somehow access the 'free' web so we could 'browse' it anywhere without having to carry a PC around? And maybe even introduce some sort of flat-rate monthly 'internet access charge' like those we have for broadband? Or how about a really crazy idea - might it even be possible to persuade people to buy proprietary 'applications' for home computers?
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, ...
how can you compare the WEB to a SMARTPHONE???
In the early pc era first there were programms then came the browser. Now we see a slow but persistent migration of most functionality of those programms to the browser platform (think google docs,...). I think the same is happening with smartphones. Just because the average smartphone browser doesnt support everything a normal pc browser does (yet), doesnt mean that long term the web in the browser wont prevail even on the phones.
There is so much fragmentation in the smartphone market it's easyer to provide content to multiple types of phones and users through the browser platform than with an app (though for now you are very limited about using your phones full hw potential). and with time and acceptance of html5 and beyond, this will be even easyer.
To develop an app that runs fine on all different platforms you have to know the ins and outs of each specific platform. In theory to develop a browser app you need to better know just one. and that one is opento each and every phone user even if he or she uses a 5year old phone. they mostly have internet capabilities.
I think that the current state of mind that apps are the future is missguided. I see it more like a fad that will gradualy fade away and give way to the constantly evolving browser/web platform for just about everything you do on you smartphone.
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold
The article confuses apps, Internet connections, with paying for media. On the desktop, it's long been the case that people pay for software (despite the useful presence of free software). And people pay for their Internet connection.
Similarly with phones - people pay for applications, they pay for their connection.
And the problem on the desktop isn't that people are unwilling to pay for media, it's that it often isn't available. Can I get TV on demand online for a charge? Not as far as I know in the UK. So I've no doubt that people will pay money for an app that gives them TV on a phone, but they would do so on the desktop too.
Where pay-for media is struggling is news. Are people more like to pay to read a newspaper on their 5800 than on their Intel Windows PC?
They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year
Ah yes, a multitude of computing devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets, PMPs, phones), but let's give the obligitary product placement to the Ipad. Do we really think that most people will be walking around with an Ipad? And are netbook users etc going to start paying for content?
And with Apple in the driver's seat
Hah. Thankfully - given the article's valid concerns about their closed policy - this isn't remotely true when we look in terms of things like market share. Though no doubt I predict plenty of replies arguing until they're blue in the face that they are (or redefining market share to use some arbitrary criteria where they are first).
Twitter, like other recent-vintage social networks, is barely bothering with its Web site; its smart-phone app is more fully featured. The independent TweetDeck, which collates feeds across multiple social networks, is not browser-based.
This sort of thing is hardly new, nor necessarily a bad thing. Years ago, people used Usenet clients. Many people still use email clients. Sites like LiveJournal have downloadable clients for desktop platforms. It goes without saying that the software versions are more featured - otherwise what would be the point of them. We didn't have hip names for them like "apps", but it's the same thing, long before people started using their phones.
But again, the article is conflating different issues - the technology (website versus software) with the idea of free content. Is anyone going to pay to read Twitter feeds, despite its use of apps?
I hope this really is the case. The WWW will be much better off if all the herdable bunch continue their slow, guided path into app-land and let the west return to the wild.
If you go back to the actual quote,
http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html
cue twenty-five years later, the first part of the quote being widely forgotten, and an army of too-smart-for-you opionators attacking their own mis-quote using the original quote's argument as their justification for why it is wrong.
It really makes you wonder what the non-populistized seventeen people later word of mouth versions of the original western religious texts were actually trying to say..
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Companies will always find ways to make money, because they are created when people come up with strategies to do so. And that is a main goal for many. Hence, there will always be growth in that direction, and it will always grow towards its maximum. Is it at its maximum? Nowhere close. And it is nowhere close even for Apple's closed garden, or for Facebook's closed social network.
HOWEVER.
Twitter and Facebook are leading the way to a new model of news and media all together. Anyone can follow anyone instantly. The viewer is connected directly to the publisher, and there are no middlemen. Distribution is a dead concept. Instant direct access by anyone to anything. And we can follow *exactly* what we want with no Ads. Not only is it free, it is superfree (no revenue model whatsoever). As long as we want to be heard, no strings will ever be attached. Furthermore, this unfiltered content directly from the source is the best kind of content for most. Goodbye big media.
Although the original article is interesting and informative, it misses one key point in its conclusion, and that is the inevitable arrival of the peer-to-peer social network platforms. GeoCities was great, but it never made the web better, and where is it now? The web is peer-to-peer and that is what makes it great. Apache never owned any of our content, and we the people will own the future social web as well. We already feel it would be better that way, and we're all just waiting for a company to make that value proposition.
That a lot of "Free" stuff also turns out to be crap. Therefore the hidden cost is the time it takes in sorting out the good free stuff from the crap. With payware certain standards are expected - or even enforced by third parties (ie an app store). In cases where some crapware does find its way into that third party store, usually there is someone to complain to and the crapware is removed quickly.
It's the old argument of "I can't be bothered to do it myself". It's why we have politicians. It's why we have religions and "gods". Because we prefer to have 'someone else' to delegate certain fears and worries to (even if that 'someone else' turns out to be corrupt in the case of politicians and clerics, or even non-existent in the case of gods). Humans are funny that way.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I just recently paid $140 for a refurbished Kindle that has unlimited wireless Internet access on it. Yeah, the interface on the "Experimental" web browser is a bit kludgy but I can check my email, sports scores, and basic stuff like that for free. Amazon is betting that enough people use Kindle's purchasing system that it pays for the limited web usage they offer. If they are right and the web browser remains free, other services may adopt similar strategies of giving away basic Internet access in exchange for locking you in as a potential customer.
In the long run I think these folks are in for a disappointment. Economics works the same way with phones that it does for computers.
(Snark)
"Hai Apple. Nice job getting Shareware to actually work! You earned your $."
(/Snark)
They got all my respect for doing business right. Everyone, take your $200 and buy your favorite apps. (Waits)
Okay, everyone back? Everyone got your nice little 50 apps at $4 each? Good. Where were we ... Oh yes, the web. Watch what happens when 50% of companies stop maintaining the back end of their apps. We'll see 12 lawsuits from critical cases, and then it will all shake out into the top 100 apps that everyone will want, and we'll go back to *basic* info wanting to be free.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
He is preping the audience to expect this and so to not be upset when it arrives.
thats why he is like essentially a lobbyist but is lobbying the public to say "hey this is normal so just except it and do it".
This is why his logic path is not really logical because he needs to bend a few times to make it all match up with his intention which is to convince readers that its normal and logical that the price should go up.
Its a common technique, like a self fulfilling prophecy
Apparently, the "consumers" are like grass: just an infinite [1] supply of fodder to be exploited, with all the decisions being made for us up the food chain.
[1] I live in the West, and see on a regular basis how infinite that "sea of grass" really wasn't.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying ...because everyone realizes at some point that they like to eat three times a day, and sleep in a warm dry bed, and that fulfilling those desires is not free. "Free" information isn't, it's a gift; someone had to pay for it.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I'm just having fun that Apps are so much better than Windows Mobile 6. After I get all my shinies, I'll just go back to my life.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Disclaimer: I havent RTFA yet, and sometimes the summaries don't accurately reflact their FAs. But from the summary, TFA seems particularly clueless. First, "Information wants to be free" is IMO clueless in itself. Information doesn't want to be free any more than your doorknob wants to be free. You could as easily say "Information wants to be paid for". But when information isn't free, neither are you.
Second, "The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway" is just as clueless. The internet is the internet, whether you're accessing it from your phone or your PC. Few have 4G smartphones. Mine isn't 4G, but it will access the internet, and guess what? There are tons of free apps for it. And an iPhone is 4G, but 4G isn't iPhone any more than a four legged animal is a dog. Apple has always been a walled garden, and that's how Apple customers like it. But most of us aren't Apple customers.
It's far from a given that this shift will generate the kinds of revenue media companies are used to
Who gives two shits whether or not media companies get revenue? I don't, and neither should anyone not invested in media company stock. I'm sick of the corporate whores and the corporate media they own turning the world into a bunch of money worshiping greedheads who believe "free=worthless". The best things in life are free: Sunsets, air, rain, FOSS, indie music, walking hand in hand with your S.O., playing catch with your grandchild, etc. Nothing you can buy holds a candle to any of these. Windows is far inferior to Linux, which isn't only free as in beer but gives one true computing freedom.
And I find it fascinating that the corporate media usually refuses to even mention FOSS. We nerds are the only ones who know about Linux; when I mention to normal people that they can replace Windows with an OS that costs nothing and is free from viruses, and there is an office suite that is likewise free, and free media playes that are superior to WiMP, they're astounded.
Now to a response to your comment about "The only question now is who will own" the web, personally I think the question is ludicrously meaningless, not important. Nobody owns it, and nobody will. It's free.
I look forward to free internet access for all, free of corporate robber barons and gatekeeprs, a mesh network where everyone opens up access to everyone else. It's doable and should be done, and I think we here at slashdot are the ones to start it. As to "the government", which government? It's a world wide web, not an American corporate web.
Free Martian Whores!
Well, Rupert Murdoch has attempted to be the first to start to charge again for his newspaper content. But the conventional wisdom is that if you offer your content for free, then start charging again while your competitors don't, that you're going to be the sacrificial lamb who ends up crashing and burning. Certainly, if Murdoch succeeds, his competitors will be more than happy to follow suit, but no one else is exactly lining up until they see that he doesn't fall on his ass.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Most people don't have a smartphone. Most people have a basic mobile where you press a few buttons and talk to people - that's all.
Note that a cheap supposedly non-smart phone (so called "feature" phone) these days let's you access the Internet, runs full web browsers, runs apps. In fact it's been that way since at least 2005, and these days such phones even have touchscreens. The distinction of "smartphone" today is really just to refer to "a high end phones" (e.g., faster processors, more features like wireless), or in some cases just a matter of marketing (e.g., Nokia label Symbian as "smartphone", S40 as "feature phone"; the original Iphone was a smartphone simply because Apple marketed it as such, despite it lacking many features).
I'm not sure if you can even get "dumb" phones that can only talk and text these days, but they'd be at the very cheapest end of the market.
Not that I disagree with your comment - I still dislike how most phones are locked down, which is why I'm glad of things like netbooks, where you can run full open source operating systems, rather than them being locked down toys.
I no longer really use it that much, but when I did use my iPod Touch to get App-store apps, the VAST majority of the apps that I downloaded and used were in fact, free. Not as in speech, but as in beer at least. It seems like for the vast majority of things that I wanted, there were either people willing to donate their time, or who were hoping to recoup their costs via another method (IIRC, Fandango had out a movie show time listing app for free that was subsidized by the ability to buy tickets online to most of those movies).
Look at Android: a very popular cellphone OS that is in fact, Free.
I personally see "Free" taking off even more now. PARTICULARLY on desktop PC's. Smartphones, with their varied landscape, are essentially teaching users to deal with different platforms. If they can get to the web, manage their photos, and perform basic services, then they're fine with that. If the UI is a little different between new phones, then no biggie. Many content providers are doing the same too. They can't code their websites to IE6 and claim "most everybody is using that anyways". These days LOTS of people will be hitting that site with a phone, and hence sites are by necessity going to have to be coded to be more tolerant of various browser rendering engines. Once that user mindset is starts to bleed over into desktops a bit, I think a tolerance for something "a little different looking" will come. When that tolerance gets here, the Linux option on a new PC is going to look very nice if the user can save $25-50 on the total cost.
In short, I think we're just moving from a de-facto single vendor model to a fractured model. Sure, some new pay solution will arise here, but I think the door is wide open for OSS here too.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If you want to know why the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying, it is because the Internet has been taken over by business interests; the original network of academics and hackers is just a tiny fraction of what the Internet has now become.
If you want to know why that happened, look at the post-1996 audience for the internet: people who would otherwise be watching television.
They're looking for entertainment and socialization, not "information" in the colloquial sense of knowledge-bearing data.
Futurist Traditionalism
The 5th Annual World eBook Fair is currently underway from July 04 - August 04 with over 3,500,000 PDF eBooks available for, ahem, FREE.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I will gladly pay to have things freed.
And there will always be "business men" trying to prove you have to give your gold to them. This is so old there's a fable about it!
Seriously, confusing these two meanings (free and free) can only be for two reasons:
- malice, if there's an agenda (think M$) or
- incompetence -- yet can any publication afford such mistake?
the rhythm of change is beating faster and faster as time goes on.
Alvin Toffler wrote about this in 1970 in his book Future Shock. Technology is advancing at a faster and faster rate, and his prediction is that at some point technology will be changing faster than many people can adapt. This will have an effect similar to culture shock where the technology around these people has changed so much that they are not able to function normally in society.
...hardly result in an inability to sell them. Apps aren't a gold mine, they're a carnival sideshow. Big data is where the money is going to be, apps are just part of the "feeder" infrastructure.
That is a worship word. Yang worship. You will not speak it.
If anything it's the opposite; there has never been more open source-software and -users as there is today, which is what matters. Open source software depend on its community to evolve, if that community is bigger than yesterday, then I don't see any "end" anywhere. So what if every buffoon got a pc these days, making the percentile of the population using open source smaller? If that makes you proclaim that open source is dead, then you don't understand the mechanics of open source.
I couldn't care less about market-share, obtain user-criticality and that'll fix itself.
So many people talking about "information wants to be free" do not seem to understand what "information" really is, and the difference with "data".
Information wants to be free - that adagio stands, has always stood, and will always stand. The problem is that people do not know how to distinguish between data and information. The data is just a representation of information.
Take for example this post: as soon as I posted it it becomes a piece of data on some server rented by the /. company. Just that: data. How to get to that data? You need a computer with Internet connection. Now that connection may become more expensive, getting to a web site may become more expensive (e.g. subscriptions), but the information that I give here wants to be free.
For example the following sentence: "Spain won the world cup football 2010 by beating the Dutch team in the finals 1:0". That contains information on the world cup football. It is also a piece of data. Getting to that piece of data (the actual sentence) may become more expensive, the information in it (winner of the world cup, score) can be re-told over say the phone when someone who read this is talking to a friend. That information bit never got more expensive. It wants to be free. The information spreads because people like to talk to one another (irrelevant of the medium), and they like to tell each other things the other party didn't know yet. To discuss facts, to discuss bits and pieces of information they learnt through other channels. Such as the world cup line above - it won't be new to many people here but that's not the point. It's a bit of information that is stored in a chunk of data.
On the other hand, data is just that. Lots of numbers, letters, whatever. An LP contains two immensely long wavy grooves, typically representing some kind of music. An mp3 file could be a digital representation of the same sound. Both are different representations of the same data, they may each not be free (cost of the record, restrictions by DRM).
The adagio also says WANTS TO. Information is, thus, not necessarily free. It wants to be free. In the extreme this is seen by the "Streisand effect" where attempts to stop spreading information leads to more people spreading it, including the information bit that someone is trying to block this spreading. In the digital world this often happens by the direct copying of digital files containing said information, previously it often resulted in headlines in the news papers talking about it - all with the same information, all with a different wording (the letters on a news print are a form of data in itself, and as we all know the newspaper you have to buy but who won the elections you hear for free from your friends).
So who-ever wants to use this adagio, please remember these core points here:
And please stop discussing pricing of data plans...
Information costs people $$$ whether you obtain the data yourself and convert it to information, or if you simply obtain the information; both take time to obtain, interpret, and ultimately make a decision on. It seems that people think that free information is like a free lawnmower on craigslist. People who are too plugged into the information will suffer massive withdrawal when their "information drug" becomes too expensive for them to obtain. We could see that people who are unable to access Facebook, Twitter, Digg, iTunes, etc. will in fact have a life crisis. Information moderation is key since it does cost you time, but information overload, particularly information which may become too expensive will be the next vice for this generation. I can see it now, bringing back Crocket and Tubbs for Miam"I" vice.
If you have to force me not to copy, transmit or distribute then the data DOES want to be free. Yes, nobody is anthropomorphizing it, but it still wants to be free in the same way as "nature abhors a vacuum" or "energy wants to travel in the direction of lower heat".
If you have to force me not to communicate, then data does want to be free and you have to work to stop it moving about.
if i stand in the middle of the desert with bottles of water for $100 each, i will have a profitable business
but if i stand in front of a sparkling clean fresh water lake and try to sell bottles of water for $.10 each, i will be out of business
when i can point and click and share thousands of files effortlessly and freely with any teenager from gdansk to johannesburg, i really don't know how or why someone is supposed to force me to pay for that under a dead distribution model and the laws that are made for that dead era
so its simple economics folks: infinite free supply means there is no price point. the internet is an unlimited resource, unless they fundamentally break the internet inexorably (and thereby destroy that which makes the internet attratice to anyone)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I really wish you folks would stop writing "noone". It's two words, no one. "Noone" reads like "noon" and slows reading down.
Mods, my "no karma bonus" button doesn't seem to work, so please mod me offtopic. Thx.
Free Martian Whores!
is the new meme for the internet? Fuck 'em. If they wanna get paid let them invent something I really need or want. Fuck 'em if they don't. Their desire to be billionaires is not a claim against me.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
>>>FutureShock..... they are not able to function normally in society.
Or laugh at the fools scribbling to record notes in the $2000 iPhones/iPads (cost includes yearly fee), while they do the exact-same function with a 50 cent paper tablet + pen. I became an engineer because I love technology, but at the same time that love has to be moderated by common sense. New technologies should only be adopted if they are better than the old technology.
Recently a former teacher came to me (and others) for advice on a laptop for her college kid. She wanted to buy an Apple iMac, but I dissuaded her. First I said she could get an equivalent IBM PC compatible for just $370, or twice the memory as the mac for $450. Next I told her that laptops tend to have short lives, so I would recommend a Desktop not a laptop.
Anyway she ignored me, listened to her daughter's pleading, and got a $1200 iMac. Now I like Macs and consider them decent machines, but I see no reason to spend over 3 times as much money for equivalent function. Likewise I see no need to buy a PalmPilot, iPad, or similar gadget when a 50 cent tablet works just as well.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I should really say that's where we are now. Cable/satellite, music, books/magazines, video, DVDs, games, etc. etc. etc. Paying a monthly fee to one or more providers for all-you-can-eat access to content. The monthly fee's automatically deducted from your bank account and unless you're skint you kinda forget about it like sales tax. Some users swamp the system while other use it only occasionally; profits are divided up to the content providers based on usage. "To each according to his ability, to each according to his need," to paraphrase a certain economist. Information may not be free, but it'll still remain relatively inexpensive. (Unless you're talking about useful information - business research, racing tips, etc. - then yeah, you gotta pay.)
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Likewise I see no need to buy a PalmPilot, iPad, or similar gadget when a 50 cent tablet works just as well.
You don't see how a PDA could be more useful than a pen and notepad? Even for taking notes?
I don't get this attitude. I'm carrying around a bookshelf's worth of information that I can instantly search, copy and paste, share or back up to another location if I need to, all in my pocket. And some people say "why don't you just use a pen and paper." I just don't get it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Information does not want to be free.
It is information. It does not want anything. It does not think. It does not feel.
People do not want information to be free.
Certain people do not want information to be free.
Certain people want certain information to be free.
Fat, greasy, sweaty nerds want information such as movies, games, software, and industry standards to be free.
The very same fat, greasy, sweaty nerds will form a lynch mob if you so much as quote their blog without releasing the full source code of the original (and that of your version if you've edited it), or if you neglect to put a big fat Creative Commons or GPL Version 3.2.76.1058 logo on your site.
Get over yourselves.
Pay for things.
Recognize that most of your "free and open" software was built by copying (directly from code or indirectly from a design perspective) software that cost millions of dollars and several years to develop.
Respect IP law or get it changed if you have actual, reasoned arguments against its current form and implementation.
Do NOT claim that "information" want to be "free".
Do NOT endlessly spout "Free as in beer, or free as in free?" or other such moronisms.
Do NOT mod me anything other than Troll or Flamebait, because this is slashdot, and common sense must be attacked relentlessly.
I enjoyed the lead-in to the article, some interesting tidbits here and there, but beyond that it just started degrading into something tantamount to FUD. Claiming the end of the open web when in fact, the things that they tout as replacing it are products of the open mentality. Public APIs to otherwise closed systems (Facebook, Twitter) allow a degree of choice when selecting your preferred interface and allow easy scripting to retrieve that information and freely use it in scripts, bots, and other such projects. Interoperability is a large part of "free information" and we are seeing more and more of that. If anything we are seeing a revival of the open web, making free culture mainstream. I have nothing but hope for the future of the web, and I know it will be open and free.
>>>You don't see how a PDA could be more useful than a pen and notepad? Even for taking notes?
I do, such as being able to do a "find" or "Search" function, but I don't see how it's worth the +$1999 pricetag over a paper tablet or notebook. In practical terms that dollar amount equates to 100 hours of overtime at hell..... er, I mean work. I'd rather just do the Find function manually.
It's somewhat similar to how I don't think it's necessary to pay +$10,000 for an Acura with self-opening doors, when its cousin the Honda is just fine. I can open the doors manually
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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Micropayments never went anywhere on the web. There were plenty of micropayment schemes on the web, from Xanadu to CyberCoin, but they all went bust. Nobody talked about micropayments for years.
Micropayments are back. Cell phones, and Apple's devices create a direct connection between your wallet and their bank account. Those devices can suck money out of your pocket. Content providers love this. That's the big change. As banks, cable companies, and phone companies have discovered since deregulation, consumers will tolerate a slow, steady increase in small fees. After a decade you're paying $100 a month for what used to cost $20.
Sure, a lot of magazines/papers are coming out in the "app" format: you get some free (or free-ish) viewer app, then subscribe to the content. But have you seen the prices? They want you to pay 3-4 times as much per issue as you'd be paying for the dead tree version! Usually there's at least some multimedia content added, but still... at those prices, I doubt the web has much to worry about.
This whole thing strikes me as an attempt to recreate the world of content delivery via CD-ROM, only with no physical media and even higher prices. Good luck with that.
Most. Awesome. Smackdown. EVAR.
While I agree that to some extent it's a little nuts to download a ton of apps to do the same thing you can do with the browser, I can at least kind of see the attraction. I definitely prefer the iPhone Wikipedia app to firing up Mobile Safari and navigating to Wikipedia, as I find the site easier to use in its custom app.
You're either going to have to switch between websites (which requires you to either fiddle around in your list of bookmarks, bang out addresses on a teeny little keyboard, or google them); or switch between apps. But yeah, personal preference. I end up using apps for some things, browsing/googling for others.
I don't know about other people, but, I never did like the term "information wants to be free." In fact, every time I hear it, it makes my spine crawl. Almost every time someone used the term, it was a pirate script kiddie, justifying stealing IP from another party.
Information doesn't want anything. People want the products they consume to be free, but want to charge for all the stuff they personally produce. That's the truth.
The market prefers balance, although those making money prefer to constantly tip the scale in their direction, FREE as a viable option is constantly pressing on the other side. Articles can yelp about "The End of Free" yadda yadda, but the hard truth is that people seeking content, will find it. If they don't care about expensive, they will get it that way. If they care about expensive, they will get it the free way. Businesses always like to say "oh, we have them over a barrel in some way, we will make them pay", but its a lie. If the information is so closely and tightly controlled, people will do without. If they can't afford to pay, they can't afford to pay. In the 1960's thru the 1990's, American business thought China would be a good customer. "Imagine 1 billion people buying your stuff..." was the imaginary dream. Two smacks of reality: 1. do they really need your stuff? and 2. How do you think they will pay for it? Re-read #2 again. If they can't afford it, they won't buy it. It goes the same way today, but not just to Chinese customers, but also American, Greek, Spanish, Irish, and any other customer whose economy may be leaking a bit of oil. How do you expect them to pay for it? Does the cost of content provide a good return for the customer? Is it so expensive that they are constantly feeling overcharged? Perhaps the Atlantic is offering a feel-good story for its managers who as a dead-tree/no-paywall content provider, do not want to go the way of the Seattle Post Intelligencer or the Rocky Mountain News. Digital downloads of content (movies/music) has created a change in the market for these products. CD's cost $20.00. DVD's cost $24. Now individual songs go for $.99 or less. DVD's can be found in bins at many stores 3 for $10, and when on sale, 5 for $10. Competition *will* drive down costs. Online content can be obtained for (basically free), once the ISP is paid. Newspapers must re-tool to survive. People still want quality, but not just words, pictures and video too. Its easy to publish on the net. Dead trees?...not so much.
Free isn't going away if Google gets its way.
Clever signature text goes here.
Because I don't just take notes on my iPhone. iPhone and other current generation smartphones represent what I have been wanting for over a decade and can now see the reality of. A single device that does everything. I can take notes on it (which is convenient in itself because I pretty much always have the device with me, no need to worry about that particular piece of paper), listen to music on it, play games on it, watch videos on it, use it to navigate my car, get my e-mail, fact check via the Internet, talk to my friends, communicate via text with my friends, send my friends the notes I just took, in a pinch I can even manage my servers from it. I could keep going for pages here. The phone is not always the most ideal platform for doing those things, I will grant you, but it's often a very good platform for them. It can also communicate with devices that are much better platforms if I need it to, or want it to.
If my phone were replacing my paper notebook, it would be tremendously overpriced, but it's not. It's replacing my MP3 player, portable car GPS, portable DVD player, DayRunner, outdoor GPS, pedometer (which it is far more accurate than), Gameboy, E-book reader, phone, even my laptop to a limited extent. Oh, and incidentally, my paper notebook. This is a savings in more than one way. These are things that I don't have to buy or replace in the future. I've gone from having dozens of overlapping gadgets and paper records to having one thing that does it all. I've saved paper and money not buying refills for my day planner, I've saved money not buying a new GPS to replace the one that broke I gave my dad my iPod, saving him money on a new MP3 player to replace one he broke.
I spent $200 on the phone, and another $300 on my data plan, so that's $500 first year. Has it saved me $500? No, but calling the $300 for data a pure "fee" for the device is a bit of a misnomer, part of it is, but there really are expenses related to providing data services on the device. Then there's the value of convenience. I know that when I need to take a note, make a calendar entry, find a new place, listen to music, play a game, whatever... I have the thing I need to do that. It's always on my belt. Plus it's backed up to my computer (which is in turned backed up itself) so if anything happens to it, all I have to do is replace the physical hardware.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
The fight is manifested in "protocols want to be open" and a fear of free markets arising in implementations, because open protocols require "free" information. If the information is locked down, then there have to be secrets (or laws) that prevent accessing it, and therefore the protocol can't be open, so there's a limitation on implementations.
The openness of SMTP+POP/IMAP is why there was diversity in email clients. The openness of NNTP is why the mediocre discussion software 20 years ago was better than today's very best web forums. (And yes, there was web browser competition too, though some mistakenly people think it was all just Netscape vs MS. But the web case is complicated anyway, because websites blur the line between apps and dead content.)
That was the real "Digital Frontier" -- where many implementations of a protocol compete to do it best, leading to maximum user value. And you simply can't have that level of competition if the information itself is locked down. (e.g. compare watching a movie with mplayer to watching it with a licensed player from an electronics manufacturer who has to comply with DVDCCA's license or whatever. mplayer will let you skip the ads .. which means xine and vlc have to let you do it too, to stay relevant.) The freeness of the information is what allows commoditization of the protocols and formats, and variety of implementions. This is why Microsoft didn't want CIFS to be completely open (it opened a threat from Samba), didn't want people using web browsers to run applications that didn't require Windows, and so on. The threat that commoditization poses to those who want to prevent free markets, is what the "Halloween Memos" were about.
This caused an alliance between the "hippies" advocating free information for information's sake, and software user advocates who need information to be free, for software competition/evolution's sake. The author here thinks that the "hippie" ideal of information needing to be free might not last, but discounts the practical necessity of freedom -- unless you consider quality to be just another ideal which can be sacrificed.
Right now, the bar for quality and convenience on mobile devices is very low, so maybe giving up software quality isn't all that crazy. People are still willing to accept that you have to use this app to access this service; that if you want to buy music from the iTunes store, then you must use iTunes.
But how long will this last? I'm sure CompuServe and AOL had their healthy-looking days, but they're gone or irrelevant now.
Network effects might lock people into some particular services for a while, but I can't help but think that when people have access to a bunch of good XMPP apps, imagine what would happen to the idea of a Twitter app if they locked their service down so that there was only One implementation. That would be the end of them.
If the non-free content App takes off, it's not going replace the web, and even so, it's going to require sellers that can be happy in a tiny niche, looking at absolute sales figures from a small group of suckers, never ever taking a look at (and getting discouraged by) the big picture where they realize they have 0.01% marketshare. Personally, I think if people had that kind of guts, this would be The Year of Linux Gaming. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
No normal person knows what IWTBF means. Are people really that lazy that they can't be bothered to either copy and paste or type an extra 20 characters???
It's CompuServe, BIX, AOL, DELPHI, and Prodigy x people's internet. All over again.
Thaw the new upgraded Stallman clones. We're going to need them.
The individual plan for unlimited everything, no data caps, except for 450 minutes to landlines, with a per-minute charge thereafter is $70/month. For unlimited everything , it's $100/month.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your Nexus One plan at $70/month is capped at 500 minutes and does have a data cap, does it not?
Further, as an EVO owner, I can assure you that Sprint adds a $10 premium stated for 4G access (whether you use it or not) and with some suggested preferential treatments for any data throttling.
That puts the EVO at $80/month compared to your $70. Sprint charges $30/month for the feature that lets your phone act a mobile wifi hotspot - it is not required if you don't use the service, and if you do want that capability but would rather escape the charges, you simply void your warranty, root your phone and do it for free.
Bottom line, Sprint's pricing isn't mysterious, it's $10/month more to use an EVO on Sprint than a Nexus One on T-Mobile with plans that are only arguably comparable.
I'm not saying that I'm happy with the price, tho.... ;)
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Think of the past information walls that tried to charge for content:
Compuserve, Source, Prodigy, AOL, etc. Where are they now?
Why did they fail, but future walled providers will succeed?
I think that the advertisement supported content world is not dead and will not die for a very long time.
1. it's easy to track down and stop rogue printing presses. it's hard to track down and control tens of millions of tech savvy, media hungry, and, most importantly, poor teenagers
2. luckily, when you give away your book for free, you can still sign deals with hollywood, you can still endorse and advertise off your fame, you can still sell ancillary personalized material, and you can get a lot more exposure making your product free and widely available
#1 shows you that copyright law is unenforceable on the internet. they call it disruptive technology for a reason. the printing press itself was disruptive, and angry monks tried to stop it from destroying their business model of transcribing by hand too. oh well, things change. adapt or die
#2 shows you that the thought that you most control the flow of all media to make money off of it is a falsehood. the only people who are really hurt without copyright are distributors, not authors. you forgot to mention in your idyllic copyright paean above that the distributor makes most of the money off your work. in a pre-internet world, this is necessary. in a post-internet world, you don't need a distributor (and the copyright laws which really serve them, not you), you can establish your fame and make money via ancillary means all by yourself. so there is less money in circulation over all in a post-distributor internet world, but since you are getting the whole pie of income, rather than a sliver of it while the distributor takes the lion share, you actually make more money
stop defending a law which only serves parasitical distributors, not creators. stop spreading or believing that lie
and recognize that on the internet, there is a whole new world of content sharing that will make you more money than under the old system, via all sorts of ancillary means. from now on, your cultural output is your advertising, for cashing in later on your exposure
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/07/12/1237253/The-Android-Gets-Its-HyperCard
Paid app model goes back to roll-your-own, and the next dotcom bubble bites the dust.
When the Internet was new, it was a series of disconnected networks. The provider with the biggest user base (America Online) took the walled garden approach. Based on a snapshot of that moment, you might think that walled gardens would be the future and people would pay for access to each garden. Instead, the free Web* took off and walled gardens fell.
Cell phones are currently in the walled garden phase of life. This doesn't mean that the future is all walled garden. Nor does it mean that walled gardens will fall like on the Web. Still, cell phones being walled garden now doesn't mean that the free Web is going to wither and die.
* Of course, it's not totally free. You need to pay your ISP and the site needs to pay their ISP. Still, going to Google.com requires no special payment.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"People want free information." Copyrighted materials may have strings attached, but there will always be people who work to cut those strings. You can see information becoming free by the terabyte on BitTorrent.
"Information wants to be free" is a rallying cry, but it's also cautionary. Content that is sold is content that can be redistributed for free, and digital technology can make the process lossless.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Normally I skim other comments before posting, but today I'm too busy.
This whole piece is ruined by the tactic of taking people's rhetoric too literally when mounting an attack on the underlying sentiment. In the heat of the battle, people say strange things. Ten years later, the discussion needs to rise above the original Battling Tops.
What was really at stake was the transaction floor. How valuable does information need to be *before* the constrictive apparatus of scarcity and profit kicks in? Given an exponentially falling cost of production and distribution for *most* information, the transaction floor ought to be pretty darn high.
The same thing applies to the patent system. The novelty floor is presently set an order of magnitude (or three) below where it needs to be. It's not hard to find examples of defensible patents, such as the original public key patent. Your average hacker wasn't going to invent public key exchange by accident. It took a fairly large conceptual leap to realize that this might be a possible goal. The blue LED is another one that took real dedication and effort where many had failed. If you take the current patent system and shrink it to 10% or 1% of the current patent issue rate (suitable for information that wants to be expensive) the system becomes such a small shadow of its present self, that maybe it's just easier to shut it down completely.
The problem is that a patent system dialed up to a respectable level of novelty will experience a dilution pressure. There will be a constant stream of people who would like to become millionaires by gaining possession of a simple idea such as one-click shopping. The anti-patent ideologues look at this and decide that cited the "slippery slope" argument is a way to force the system into a favorable polar outcome (no patents at all).
The problem there is that if you look at every social system in the world as a slippery slope and force every aspect of every system into a polar outcome to defeat the slippery slope, you end up with a crap system. Societies do not function integrating over a trust level of zero. The right solution is to design laws that bend but don't break. It's an engineering challenge. You can't build a democratic system without managing to solve this problem at least some of the time. If you believe it's completely unsolvable, then you don't functionally believe in democracy.
Where the transaction floor on "information wants to be expensive" needs to wind up is *above* what society can achieve for free by exploiting what Clay Shirkey calls the trillion hours per year cognitive surplus. People like to create, people like to collaborate, people like to share. If that's all it takes to create information of value, we don't need some corporation erecting a toll booth to dampen value creation.
There are lots of places where corporations have something unique to *add* to the picture. Open source hasn't come anywhere close to the refinement of OS X. You get that refinement with some DRM bitters on the side, but there it is. You have a choice. Apple gave my father the run around for the last several months on the iPhone reception issue. How do you hold a tiny phone in a giant mitt without touching the corners? Just because information wants to be expensive, doesn't mean you're always getting what you paid for.
The vigorous immune rejection at the Well was probably the same thing I feel. We need less companies out there looking around for something of value where they can plant a flag post and claim to be somehow essential to something that was already proceeding just fine. Corporate hustle can often bring an algorithm to market six months ahead of when the hackers would have got there anyway. How essential is that, in the long run? The accelerated solutions often prove to be annoyingly flimsy and riddled with security flaws, so it's arguable that the corporations win this race mostly by throwing more babie
People have a finite amount of money. The internet is near infinite in practical terms. So most content will be "free" or ignored. The former earns infinitely more money (or accolades, attention, etc.) than the latter, so it makes zero economic sense for most of the internet to move to a pay model.
IMHO, smartphones will move to a more open and free model. One counterpoint to a trend is far more likely an outlier than a signal the trend is about to reverse. Wildly speculating about the latter makes for better news though.
I probably disagree with nearly all of it.
I'm not affected by 'app' pricing or smartphone price plans, nor do I intend to put myself in a position to care.
Why do I want such a smartphone when I can have an always on internet lan that's flat rate?
Why do I want to wander around on a battery powered phone staring at a tiny screen to do my work when I've been trying most of my programming career for a LARGER display and faster internet speeds.
What *overriding* concern would prompt me to trade in my 30" 2560x1600 + 50" 1920x1080 display with pen and touch input and a 7.1 channel Theater system with ~50TB of local storage for something with nothing remotely comparable but that does have poor reception, antenna problems, slow network access and poor call quality!?
Yeah -- in this guy's dream I'm moving to the a 'smart'[sic] phone.
When such a device has a 30+ hour battery life, flat rates and Gigabit speeds with at least a TB of local space and a visual display that can be displayed virtually anywhere -- or that will display on my eyeballs as a comparable multi-megapixel display, then I might be tempted, but I'm not holding my breath.
I dunno what device you're looking at, but the most expensive PDA I've ever owned (brand new, top-of-the-line model at the time) cost me $530US unlocked. You could put all the PDAs I've ever owned, the only laptop I ever bought new, and their accessories together and it would still be under $2kUS.
If you want to get a PDA on a tight budget, any old Palm with a keyboard will do fine for taking notes (I'd recommend a Treo 650/680/700p) and can be bought for under $100 these days.
I can see how cost would be a big issue if you don't have any use for any of a PDA's other functions apart from taking notes, but to me having a 3.5G-capable cell phone, a netbook-like PC, 5MP camera, GPS and FM radio all in one pocket-sized device for that price is a pretty good deal.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
you don't need a recording studio, you need a laptop. additionally, if you really love music, you will pay to make it. i don't owe you money because you want to make a song. make the damn song yourself, if its good, you'll make a profit, if not, tough luck. same as any other business venture
additionally, using free internet mp3s to build an audience, to put butts in a concert hall, is a perfectly acceptable standard of living. why do you think creators are owed any more than that?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>>>I dunno what device you're looking at, but the most expensive PDA I've ever owned (brand new, top-of-the-line model at the time) cost me $530US unlocked.
"cost includes yearly fee" for the internet connection
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
you make music because you love to make music. whatever you invest you do out of your own passion for your craft. your audience owes you absolutely nothing for that
i want to make an album. so give me $10,000. make any sense? no
you have this odd sort of entitlement, that your audience owes you something just because you sat down with a guitar. your audience doesn't owe you a goddamn thing until they go to a concert hall and sit down in front of you
your mp3s are just free advertising. your mp3s are the flyers stuck on telephone poles to get people to come to your concerts. that advertising fills warm butts in concert venues, and THATS how you make money
its called an INVESTMENT. you INVEST in your album and you MAY or MAY NOT reap a profit from the effort, just like any other business in this world. from investing in new pharmaceutical research, or decorating and stocking a new restaurant, or filming a movie: there's a big up front investment that YOU shoulder, and it is not guaranteed to pay off. that's the way the real world works honey
your sense of entitlement is unfuckingbelieveable, and shows out of touch you are
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So the article being given away for free tells about how people aren't giving things away for free anymore, and that companies doing that are destroying their business, etc. Eat your own dog food much?
stuff |
Sharing information is what makes us human, what makes us a succesful species.
Societies that have been open to the sharing of information have progressed, the ones that have stopped that sharing became wastelands of knowledge (it is no coincidence that dictatorships are mostly short lived: technical knowledge that would ensure prosperity comes paired with democratic debate, all this is most unfortunate for dictators of all stripes).
Information wants to be free in the sense that it is very diffcult to spread its disemination, but of course most dumb MBAs can think only on monetary and transactional terms about everything, which is why they keep getting this quote wrong...