
Free vs Freely Distributed  - peter123
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/06/30/free-vs-freely-distributed/
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ZeroGravitas
I'm somewhat surprised that "Free" as a concept gets people so hot under the
collar.

Like the concept of "Open Source" or "The Selfish Gene" people seem to become
enraged by the very thought of it and end up responding to straw men of their
own creation.

I've not read the Anderson book but anything I've read by him on the topic
seems almost boringly obvious to me, and I would assume anyone who spends much
time online.

I can understand people not liking it if their industry and therefore
livelihoods are under threat, but for anyone else it's seems too banal to get
worked up about.

Here's John Gruber reacting in a bizarrely prickly manner when readers pointed
out that they are consuming his ad supported blog for "free":

"Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets
charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so
well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary.
Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their
attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to
pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers
such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it."

I can't connect that in any sane way to what I've read from Anderson, only to
some "freetard" (I really dislike that word) caricature of his position. I
fear Gruber would have a stroke if I pointed out that probably most (and the
best) of my online reading matter is both produced and delivered without
direct payment or advertisment.

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jwesley
Mark Cuban's argument about the economics of Free is much better than
Anderson's original thesis or Gladwell's retort, which both rely heavily on
convenient anecdotes and clever phrasing. I guess that's the difference
between a successful businessman and pop-economics writers who sell ideas to
the masses.

------
graemep
He ignores a huge number of problems: for example, if you copyright news (i.e.
the facts), who owns it. It is often reported independently by multiple
sources in parallel. Can no one else talk about an exclusive at all? If you
need to pay to link or to re-produce short quotes you destroy a lot of the
usefulness of the web. Those are the sort of copyrights the newpaper industry
are talking about.

With regard to music, yes it is expensive to promote music, but that it partly
because of competition from lots of other well funded people. Reduce the
funding the everyone, and it will become cheaper.

That said, some of the comments are very insightful.

~~~
jwesley
The facts clearly cannot be copyrighted. What can be copyrighted (or at least
leveraged for monetization) is editorial voice, brand recognition, and
timeliness. TMZ broke the Michael Jackson story, and their reward for being
first was huge levels of traffic and citations. If anything, this was
INCREASED by citations around the web.

The "copyrights" the newspaper industry is trying to claim are more an
irrational death rattle than any sort of sensical business plan. The newspaper
giants are done for and everyone knows it. Even if they could get these laws
passed and enforced, would anybody pay to link to or cite a news source? Of
course not. You would either cite a source that waives these ridiculous fees
or start calling up sources yourself. Mark ignored these claims because they
will never amount to anything.

