“All-Free” Promoter Now Says Argument Was In Fact Bodily Waste
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 by Patrick RossIt’s not every day that I recommend readers devour every single line of a written work authored by someone other than myself (I’m smiling while writing that), but I strongly recommend doing so with Andrew Zolli’s “My Turn” column in Newsweek titled “The Future Won’t Be Free.” In fact, print it out, paste it on your refrigerator, and read it three times a day.
It’s almost too challenging to summarize, paraphrase or selectively quote, because every word is spot-on, but here’s the gist. Mr. Zolli is a longtime digirati who gave many speeches arguing information wants to be free, omitting the part of Stewart Brand’s quote that said it also wants to be expensive, because it is so valuable. He laughed at “grown-ups” who didn’t get the business model of giving everything away:
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen since, for companies whose core product is content—like every newspaper and magazine you read, including this one—the idea that we Internet visionaries sold is a total load of crap.
Love it.
He goes on to say that companies that followed his lead “have now trained a generation of young people to never, ever, ever expect to pay for content on a laptop or desktop.”
All true, and one of the reasons why we launched a charitable foundation to give away K-12 curricula, the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation.
His take on this period of hyping “free” is that it was “an echo of ’60s free culture when we all took the bad, digital acid.” But Mr. Zolli is optimistic that “new digital platforms” will find ways to compensate creators and continue to provide incentives for creation.
For the sake of all of us who value journalism and in fact any copyrighted work — from music to motion pictures to software to visual arts — let’s hope that this time Mr. Zolli has it right.
