As I’ve [Cory] written here before, copying isn’t going to get harder, ever. Hard drives won’t magically get bulkier but hold fewer bits and cost more.
Networks won’t be harder to use. PCs won’t be slower. People won’t stop learning to type “Toy Story 3 bittorrent” into Google. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something – generally some kind of unworkable magic anti-copying beans that they swear, this time, will really work.
So, assuming that copyright holders will never be able to stop or even slow down copying, what is to be done
It is an interesting, if somewhat heated, discussion on the future of copyright in the world of the “Free” and how Chris Anderson’s theories on the economics of ”Free” and “the Long Tail” are playing out in the world of where Analog Dollars are evaporating into Digital Pennies.
Once you have finished reading that skip over to BlogStorm and take a look at the next generation of “Free” and take a look at Google’s new free feature. It displays full-page previews in the search results so now you can FLINK without ever leaving Google’s search page. (see The Real Problem is FLINK! and Why I’d buy a FLINK!)
Move on to take another a look at Jaron Lanier’s complaints about the emerging masses of “digital peasants” being forced to provide free material to a few “lords of the clouds” (i.e Google) (see The Internet? Great idea pity about the implementation) and then pay Mark Cuban a visit (see Are you a one hit wonder or a meal ticket) before taking a look at IAB Europe’s The €100 Billion Free Ride: Consumers Take Most Of Web’s Value [PDF]
“The study suggests that if those services that are currently provided for free were to be charged for (at a level that generates the same amount of revenue as ad-supported services), at least 40% of current users could stop using the internet.”
Then move on to the NY Times article Has Online Sharing Spurred a New Offline Sharing Economy?
“It’s part of a move the authors of the research trace from an ownership economy to an access economy. In this new economy, a variety of new services have been developed in order to allow people use of an asset without having to actually buy or own it”
Finish the journey off with this earlier piece from 2008.
“It is already remarkable how much vocabulary is shared between “socialism” and “social media”.” - The Communist Manifesto of Chris Anderson – AdLab
Now ask yourself this question: Is “Free” the new social capitalism or the new capitalist socialism?
Both Free and the Long Tail are complex ideas. Both are rooted in the idea that the costs of doing business on the internet are rapidly approaching zero as the technology evolves into a fragmented free market of Micro-Transactions.
However, like any free market, the internet functions as a Commonwealth of Shared Interests. If the commonwealth of trust evaporates then so does the market. For example if, in the end producers and distributors of content decide they are unable to obtain fair value for their products on the internet they will withdraw from the market and go in search of other platforms. This is why new technologies like the iPad and the iPhone are so warmly welcomed by the publishers.
The ideas behind the internet as a Commonwealth of Shared Interests points us towards the older idea of the Tragedy of the Commons and it comes as no surprise to discover that discussions on how market forces will manage and profiting from the Tragedy of the Digital Commons pre-date Chris Anderson’s efforts to place a conceptual framework around the digital economy. However I have never thought the economics of the commons applied to the internet. After all the original economic modelling of the Tragedy of the Commons was based on the idea that the market or the community was sharing a finite resource.
Anybody who has done any research on the explosive growth of the internet over the past 20-15 years can tell you that we are looking at a model more attune to the Big Bang Theory than a closed loop system. The potential for web content creation is infinite (i.e. we can generate robot code that generates web pages and there are no shortage of lonely people desperately wanting the world to look their way). It is the consumption of the content that is the constraint on the market. There are only so many consumer and only so many hours in the day to consume media. Indeed the great irony of the internet media model is the more people create the less time they have to consume. These are the ideas I explored in Surfing the Edge of Chaos and Forget Freemium. Tomorrow we’ll be talking Me-mium.
There is no Tragedy of the Digital Commons. Though I do suspect we may have inadvertently created something of an elaborate ponzie scheme though our ongoing efforts to attract traffic by “gaming the system”.
Further Reading
- So just how do you make money out of serving up a free lunch?
- Why putting ads on the menu won’t pay for lunch
- This is how you make money out of a free lunch!
- How to arrange to have somebody else provide your customers with a free lunch
- 7 4 U 3 4 Me
Background Reading
- Progress – Russ Roberts
- Chris Anderson re-evaluates the economics of ‘free’ - eConsultancy
Posted on October 11, 2010
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