October 22, 2009

A column worth reading (“If the future’s worth having, it won’t be free”) appeared recently in The U.K. Times Online. It’s a well-crafted case for the simple proposition that people who create content that is used and enjoyed by others deserve to be compensated and that business models based solely on generating advertising revenues around free content cannot sustain investment in the creation of the product.  

It’s been fun: like a jammed fruit machine spewing free tokens or a whisky-galore shipwreck. But it’s got to stop. Content — whether music, films, pictures, news or prose — can’t be free and flourish. The music and movie industries are fighting: journalism, after the ego trip of gaining millions of online readers, is following. It has to. There is no alternative…

Content is not cost free. Writing is work. Musicianship involves cost and labour, art is not innately free, nor the infrastructure of news reporting. Until food, clothes, housing and transport are doled out free, content-makers need to be paid. The theory that advertising revenues will cover that, in any medium, is tosh.

The music community, of course, experienced these challenges before other industries, but the expansion of broadband deployment and advances in other technologies is rapidly forcing others to confront and grapple with the same issues. We’ve found there’s no easy, silver bullet answer. The most effective strategy remains offering consumers a compelling lawful experience, supplemented by educational efforts and targeted enforcement of rights. It’s a multi-faceted approach, but what connects it all is a respect for property and appreciation that those who create a product deserve to be compensated.   The good news is that this basic point is increasingly realized -- and becoming a rallying cry -- by other content industries as they too transition to this brave new digital world.