First one free, second one half price

[sarastro_us]

An interesting blog post appeared on ReadWriteWeb this morning.

The Danger of Free
Written by Alex Iskold / January 16, 2008 5:19 AM

Everyone loves to get stuff for free. We line up to get a free drink, we sign up for free checking accounts, and we're happy to get a free gift with the purchase of our next car. We love free stuff, even though we

Comments

[pixxelpuss]

Hmm... I agree with some of what the poster is saying. I do think that larger companies have an unfair advantage in the marketplace when they can make things free (or bundle them) and use this strategy to crush their competitors. That's a fair point. Although the end of the article degenerates into middle-aged boo-hooing about kids today and how lazy and ungrateful they are.

But I have to admit that I think the comment you've included is total bullshit. The reason the RIAA is evil and patent protection is evil and DRM and IP laws are evil? That has nothing to do with the cost of goods. People are willing to pay for good products to make sure that the people who make them can eat. Yes, even the pixel-stained technopeasants. Radiohead is making money by not in fact selling their new album. People still buy CDs and DVDs, bit-torrenting be damned. It is the intrusive ways that these IP-protectors are trying to change things that makes them hated. The RIAA says that it is no longer good enough to have purchased an album on iTunes. If you burn a cd of a LEGALLY PURCHASED album to play on your car stereo, they say that's stealing. They put taxes onto writable media, supposedly to cover the costs of piracy. But these IP protecting middle-men don't actually do any good. The RIAA is a drain on the music industry. They only market the top handful of acts, the smaller bands are barely getting by. They make only a tiny percentage of the profit from their creative works because of the parasitic presence of the labels and the RIAA. One-hit wonders end up in enormous debt to their labels. Even if you accept the assumption that the profit motive drives innovation and creativity (and I for one do not), where's the profit motive for a mid-level band? They make peanuts, and so unless you're willing to make utterly marketable and generic slop you cannot make money as a musician in the industry as it stands today, no matter how creative and talented you are. The recording industry is losing out on the long tail, which new technologies would allow them to cash in on if they weren't so greedy and stupid. The situation isn't so much that people demand things for free, but that they won't pay for nothing.

If you really buy into the profit-motive as driving creativity, you're in the wrong business anyway. If the RIAA were running the print publishing industry, there would be no book lending or borrowing allowed. Libraries would have to buy multi-user licenses that cost orders of magnitude more than single-user licenses. Doctor's offices would have to buy business/corporate licenses for their magazines in the waiting room. What author would write a new novel when people can just go to the library and read it? The author is clearly hemorrhaging money thanks to public libraries, right? How many people go out and buy all of the books they read for free through the library? Clearly this spells the end of literary fiction as we know it.

I think I'll cross-post this to my journal, actually. I like it.

[sarastro_us]

True enough. The reason I pulled out the comment is that I've wondered for some time about the nature of the changing ethical structure around free products due to the proliferation of information available on the internet. I'm not really making a judgment about whether it's good or bad yet, but the idea that everything should be available for free on the web in definitely growing.

[pixxelpuss]

That's definitely fair to wonder about. I love Richard Stallman, but it is not a foregone conclusion that all information should be free (and as he says it's not the "free beer" kind of freedom). In the new Sam & Max episodic game, a group of old computers is talking about how they get all of their information from wikipedia, and one says "Information wants to be Wrong!"

My problem with the entire IP situation is that I feel like it was designed to protect individual innovators, but instead only really protects enormous corporations (who in my opinion do not really need the protection).

[sarastro_us]

Personally, I think Stallman is a bit of a freak, but the issue here is not people's rights, it's their expectations. As a librarian, one of the contexts I try to think of this in is how to explain to a patron what the difference between articles they might find in ProQuest or EBSCO or one of the other big aggregators and something random they found on Google. Google has given them the impression that anything they want can be found for free, but many of them do not understand that what they lose is quality. Google Documents may work for most people, and if fact, works fine for most of the uses that I need an office suite for, but it doesn't work for everyone, and that needs to be understood. It's not the software that's failing, it's the user who's failing to understand its proper use.

That said, I definitely agree that copyright is failing today. There was an interesting post on Slashdot yesterday about how the general public's understanding of copyright is completely out of touch with what the law actually says. Probably due to the campaign against fair use that the big content providers have been waging for years. Anyway, like I said, my primary interest is being able to help people balance an understanding of their rights with changing digital informational ethical constructs and changing expectations.

[pixxelpuss]

I can't argue with any of that. I mean, I wish EBSCO were free (since I'm going to have to pay for it once I'm out of school, I'm getting addicted). But a user failure to understand the real purpose of a product is not a sign that the product has failed (like Wikipedia, actually). The article on Slashdot is awesome. Thanks for the link. I'm going to have to look around more. The Fair Use stuff is so weird.

[sarastro_us]

Fair Use stuff is so weird.
The sum total of an entire quarter's worth of graduate seminar education on this topic can be summed up in one word.

YMMV

;-)