thnks www.sitehazirla.org

This is very smart and deceptively simple. It contains the key to unlocking business models in the ‘pirate’ world and ’ film izlelong tails’ :-) I suspect VCs should have these bullet points as a mental checklist before funding a project

Very interesting ideas, and almost entirely on the mark, I think. Your final jab at pharmaceuticals, however, is definitely off base. If you ever visit a modern pharmaceutical plant and talk to the chemists running it, you’ll immediately realize that for most medicines, manufacturing is extremely complicated, expensive, and sometimes even dangerous work. It’s also highly regulated, and it should be; a tiny error can turn a batch of therapeutic drugs into a pile of lethal toxins. That’s a level of risk the printing or garment-making industries seldom face.

Some really nice thoughts here. My one concern is that many of the 8 qualities that you mention are features of data, and in that sense are subject to the same rules as information goods.

Fascinating and well condensed view sounds like a book in the works If not there should be!

Yes, information is easily copied, but information is nothing. The number of leaves on a tree in my back yard is hard information. No one cares and no one ever will. So, what makes information relavant? First, the information must serve a purpose. Next, information must take a useful form. Finally, information must be better than alternative competing information. The “leaves on tree” information fails the first test (as does most information on the net and any given moment). However, a lot of internet information fails the second test because the internet only copies CODED information, where the code can interpreted an electronic devide to be understood by a human. All types of information, for example different flavors, are impossible to encodem but the most important information that it cannot copy are functional skills. For example, I can explain guitar playing on the internet, but people have to practice that skill to obtain it in a useful form. Finally, that leaves us with better and worse informaton. Quality matters. Newton is fine unless you are launching a space craft and then you need Einstein.

Hi, For some practical examples of musicians tackling these issues, check out this BBC Radio 1 documentary about the UK underground….

It took me a while to accept that songs should be free but now it’s extremely liberating. I use the songs and free guitar lessons as ‘lead generators’, getting attention and people into my ‘funnel’. And I don’t worry about copyright issue and the next new business model for record labels.

Once you have your community (via an email list), from there you can upsell a certain percentage of the keenest fans into higher priced, less copyable offerings, such as a ‘backstage VIP club’. http://membershipschool.com/selling-access

I give away my songs and some guitar lessons for free as ‘lead generators’. Then I sell access to my video guitar courses through a membership site. I’m not into touring and selling the experience that way anymore. I prefer to interact online to a global market. Bands or independent musicians can sell access to their ‘behind the scenes’ content like songwriting, tours, gigs, etc using a membership site with different price points. I show you how to do this at http://membershipschool.com/selling-access

An items value doesn’t change when its supply changes, unless the value of the item is specifically sohbet dependent on the supply (collector items, money, bragging items).

Quality can sometimes be copied. Sometimes counterfeits resimler can be exact, in which case quality has been copied. Often a counterfeit is not perfect and quality is lost. Exactly quality-equal counterfeits are much more common and likely in the digital world. In porno izle theory I can make an equal quality copy of a piece of software that is no less than the original. In the material world — right now - it is much harder to make a perfect copy.

*///

Excellent stuff. The key to unlocking new business models

thanks yuuuuuu :D

Hi Kevin, thank you very much for this! I have found it inspiring, simple and useful! Regards, Doppiafila

One of the new rules of marketing is to distribute for free, as much of your materials and ideas as possible.Thanks for reminding us that this strategy only works with the underlying generatives in place.

Very interesting ideas, and almost entirely on the mark, I think. Your final jab at pharmaceuticals, however, is definitely off base. If you ever visit a modern pharmaceutical plant and talk to the chemists running it, you’ll immediately realize that for most medicines, manufacturing is extremely complicated, expensive, and sometimes even dangerous work. It’s also highly regulated, and it should be; a tiny error can turn a batch of therapeutic drugs into a pile of lethal toxins. That’s a level of risk the printing or garment-making industries seldom face.

It’s true that pharmaceutical companies also apply huge - sometimes obscenely huge - markups to their products, even beyond what the production costs justify. But that just means they could be sold for less in an intelligently regulated system. That’s quite different wow gold from saying that the production costs are approaching zero. They are not.

I think I agree with Alan Dove regarding your take at the pharmaceutical companies, otherwise this is a very insightful piece of work. Great job

Quality can sometimes be copied. Sometimes counterfeits can be exact, in which case quality has been copied. Often a counterfeit is not perfect and quality is lost. Exactly quality-equal counterfeits are much more common and likely in the digital world. In theory I can make an equal quality copy of a piece of software that is no less than the original. In the material world — right now - it is much harder to make a perfect copy.

This is a fantastic discussion. What is the point of copyright on the internet if everything is a copy of something. Tough one this one. Good topic for discussion.

“When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.” Thanks for useful informations.

Best regards

I mean really our whole film izle culture is based on it. Ayfer If you look around the room you’ll be hard-pushed to find anything that isn’t in some way a copy.

You wrote a wonderful article that summarize my thoughts too. The eight generatives represent great challenges for the “labels” but great opportunities for new comers!

This is an excellent article about getting people to pay for your material. I’ve linked to it over on LiveJournal community cyberfund_creat

Kevin

Great article - one of the most thought-provoking things I’ve read this week.

In addition to your list of eight generatives, though, you should consider adding usability.

A great example of how people will pay for great usability is the success of the iTunes music store.

A few years ago, people thought that Napster & the Internet would be the end of the music industry. There were failed music sites by the horde.

Apple analyzed how free music worked on the Internet. Then they came up with something that was so much more usable that people have been happy to give the company 4 billion dollars to download music they probably could have downloaded for free.

Part of iTunes’ success at competing with free can be attributed to immediacy and findability. But they aren’t why people have paid the premium.

iTunes utility and usability turned something that had been fairly dodgy into something easy and fun. http://www.optimumpeyzaj.com 4 billion dollars of easy and fun - way better than free!

This is very smart and deceptively simple. It contains the key to unlocking business models in the ‘pirate’ world and ’ long tails’ :-) I suspect VCs should have these bullet points as a mental checklist before funding a project

Books aren’t equipped with instant messaging and social networking though. This isn’t a positive or negative thing, but surely it impacts at least the intensity of spending hours in ones living room reading an entire book.

I think the Kindle vs. paperback book test is a good one. How do we react to even the smallest changes in our experience in reading. From page turning to scrolling (or pressing next page?), from paper reflecting light into our eyes to a screen sending it directly etc. At what point in the spectrum from book to evden eve nakliyat screen does any major change in our brains occur. My suspicion is that any little change in the technology of reading is vastly overshadowed by our environments.

You wrote a wonderful article that summarize my thoughts too. The eight generatives represent great challenges for the “labels” but great opportunities for new comers!

This is very smart and deceptively simple. It contains the key to unlocking business models in the ‘pirate’ world and ’ long tails’ :-) I suspect VCs should have these bullet points as a mental checklist before funding a project

Oyun Hileleri

You wrote a wonderful article that summarize my thoughts too. The eight generatives represent great challenges for the “labels” but great opportunities for new comers!

Oyun Hileleri

Bravo Excellent article! Let’s just hope some of the big corporations read it too…

I’m a student working with ibiblio.org, which provides a lot of stuff for free and runs on donations. I see a lot of what we try to do articulated neatly above, but I’d be interested in your take on ibiblio.

For a while I’ve been playing with this idea that “copying” is actually a fundamental human drive. I see it everywhere I look - everything from fashion to linguistics to basic human development - children are obsessive copiers. They often seem to like copying even more than shouting and breaking things.

The internet is (similar to the kids), one giant attention-seeking machine, and a big part of it seems to be to do with either propagating memes, or mutating and propagating them - and I’ve also noticed that people tend to think that when they say “check this out”, they’re actually doing the meme a favour. And they’re right.

I mean really our whole film izle culture is based on it. If you look around the room you’ll be hard-pushed to find anything that isn’t in some way a copy.

Copy, mutate, test… copy, mutate, test… copy, mutate, test… it’s what we do. I think we should be incubating this process, not bottlenecking it.

This seems to dovtail nicely with the concepts of scarcity and abundance. If you spend all you time worrying that there are not enough people to buy what you are selling, you will wind up holding on to bad clients way longer than you should. Where if you believe there is an abundance of business for everyone and that the people best suited to your talents and working with you will find you, you have so many more opportunities for increased production but also a more pleasant life..

I fully agree with you. For years I’ve been emphasizing that in an age of reproduction (see Walter Benjamin) we have to focus on authenticity instead of copyright matters. For instance, in the music industry, distributing “canned” music for free; will make live-performances more spectacular, experimental and authentic. Selling cd’s after the show (of the show), like Prince does, is mainly interesting for the ones who attended.

I would have paid you for this type of blog post you just gave away for free!

I would like suggest you add one moe thing to your list - consumers are willing to pay for Community. If you build a Community around your media, people will pay to be in it.

One of the reasons I paid for the NY Times Select online is because it allowed me to be one of the few to leave comments in their special sections. Too bad they didn’t leverage that feeling all the way. I think people would pay to be in a NY Times full blown social network.

Also, sometimes I listen to music just to have something to talk about with my friends. Community is valuable, and something worth paying for.

thanks

most medicines, manufacturing is extremely complicated, expensive, and sometimes ing is to distribute for free, as much of your materials and ideas as possible time worrying that there are not enough people to buy what you are selling, you ptively simple. It contains the key to unlocking business models in the ‘pirate’ world and thansk

Fascinating and well condensed view sounds like a book in the works If not there should be!

Kevin, you are absolutely right when you are talking about current marketing trend. Priceless ideas. Must read!

It’s true that pharmaceutical companies also apply huge - sometimes obscenely huge - markups to their products, even beyond what the production costs justify. But that just means they could be sold for less in an intelligently regulated system. That’s quite different from saying that the production costs are approaching zero. They are not.

yeah!!This is a fantastic discussion. What is the point of copyright on the internet if everything is a copy of something. Tough one this one. Good topic for discussion.good!!

This seems to dovtail nicely with the concepts of scarcity and abundance. If you spend all you time worrying that there are not enough people to buy what you are selling, you will wind up holding on to bad clients way longer than you should. Where if you believe there is an abundance of business for everyone and that the people best suited to your talents and working with you will find you, you have so many more opportunities for increased production but also a more pleasant life

Hi Kevin, it�s nice to see some fresh thinking on this concept/problem.

A lot of us are scrambling for new, outside the box, profitable ways to monetize our content.

We�ve only begun to see the possibilities.

Great article, one of the best I�ve read on the topic. I think the music industry can learn a thing or 2 about this free model�

Incremental cost of using them is nil or almost nil, but you and I support this invisible giant copy machine in a very real way!!

Thanks Kevin

Superbly insightful and masterfully written�. you sure you didn�t COPY it?

This is a fantastic discussion. What is the point of copyright on the internet if everything is a copy of something. Tough one this one. Good topic for discussion.

Thanks for the interesting read. Really got me thinking. I wrote a response on my blog and would appreciate any comments/critique.

Kevin, you are absolutely right when you are talking about current marketing trend. Priceless ideas. Must read!

Some very interesting and insightful thoughts. I like this.

Susan

Hi Kevin, thank you very much for this! I have found it inspiring, simple and useful! Regards, Thanks for the insightful post.

Good piece.

Ed Gerck, that is an interesting notion — that trust can be copied, if you copy all the info about it. Say you copy all the data in an ebay reputation, would that duplicated the trust perfectly? I think it would be conveyed only if the new host of the inforamtion — the ebay wannabe — had an equal reputation. If some sleazy fly-by night company hosted the reputation even though it was perfectly copied, it would not hold the same trust. So I think it is more complicated. But it is worth thinking about. Thanks.

Thank you for writing this Kevin. Your essay helps me put my own value to the marketplace into perspective. I do independent IT work, and (in your terms), what I’m selling is:

Trust (People trust my solutions) Immediacy (fixing it faster than others can) Interpretation (I’ll explain in plain English)

Bob

In the digital economy, we had to learn how to copy trust and we did. For example, SSL would not work if trust could not be copied. So, this point needs a correction by Kelly.

How do we copy trust? By recognizing that because trust cannot be communicated by self-assertions, trust cannot be copied by self-assertions either.

To trust something, you need to receive information from sources OTHER than the source you want to trust, and from as many other sources as necessary according to the extent of the trust you want. With more trust extent, you are more likely to need more independent sources of verification.

To copy trust, all you do is copy the information from those channels in a verifiable way and add that to the original channel information. We do this all the time in scientific work: we provide our findings, we provide the way to reproduce the findings, and we provide the published references that anyone can verify.

To copy trust in the digital economy, we provide digital signatures from one or more third-parties that most people will trust.

This is how SSL works. The site provides a digital certificate signed by a CA that most browsers trust, providing an independent channel to verify that the web address is correct — in addition to what the browser’s location line says.

Reference: “Trust as qualified reliance on information” in http://nma.com/papers/it-trust-part1.pdf and Digital Certificates: Applied Internet Security by J. Feghhi, J. Feghhi and P. Williams, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-20-130980-7, 1998.

Kevin,

You have some interesting thoughts - and some interesting detractors. Some would argue that free copying has come and gone, but your point persists. Entire companies exist to service open source, which can be copied an infinite number of times. Of course that model deviates from your basic tenant - the open source is basically an “LE” (Limited Edition). Most open source service companies provide a full feature, scalable enterprise version for a hefty license fee. This is then fundamentally different than your premise. On the other hand, no Digital Rights Management system ever devised has withstood the test of time/hacker scrutiny. From that perspective, information and applications may continue to be copied and illegally transmitted. I don’t think any legislative or enforcement system will ever put an end to that.

Back to your thesis though; I think you need to add one called “reliability”. This embodies the three elements of a classic security program (confidentiality, integrity, availability), but do so in a way that provides confidence that software or services will work when and as needed. This is a value added service surrounding software and hardware that can’t be found simply by copying something from someone else since “reliability” is truly the output of good processes (human factors). One of your generatives hint at this through “trust”, but reliability is a more fundamental building block that also leads to trust. Trust grows from having a product that delivers on expectations repeatably. Reliability is that foundation. Authenticity is great, but authentic software can be run “unreliably” leading to lack of trust even if the product is authentic. Even authentic software can have bugs and problems that must be remediated through “reliable” services, such as managing a firewall, IDS/IPS, Web Application Firewall, keeping spam filters updated, providing “reliable” patching services to our constituents/servers, etc…

I hope you can see that Reliability is a function of human activity that is not replicatable and deserves it’s spot in the sun.

George

I’m an author, and your remarks were encouraging to read.

My main site is at http://JonathansCorner.com/ , and the business side is meant to be freeconomics or better than free: “Full text is online to read for free; I’ll try to make it as nice an experience as I can and as easily available as I can. If you’d like to buy a nice hardcover book you can curl up with, I’d be happy to sell you one.”

It was quite nice for me to read you article.

I have found two interesting sources http://fileshunt.com and http://filesfinds.com and would like to give the benefit of my experience to you.

@rchz

Quality can sometimes be copied. Sometimes counterfeits can be exact, in which case quality has been copied. Often a counterfeit is not perfect and quality is lost. Exactly quality-equal counterfeits are much more common and likely in the digital world. In theory I can make an equal quality copy of a piece of software that is no less than the original. In the material world — right now - it is much harder to make a perfect copy.

Very nice article. Insightful.

I’d like to add that i think “Quality” is an intangible which cannot be copied. While it is possible to copy works which are high in quality, copying a low quality work does not make it high quality.

Quality is usually associated with price, but not always. It easy to find high-priced items that are low quality. Thus, culture strive for this ideal of quality. I was surprised not to find it on the list.

I believe it is still true that, for those who appreciate it, people will pay for the intangible of quality. Even as both are mass produced, a silver knife will fetch a higher price than a plastic one, and a well-crafted one an even higher price, not simply because it is a brand name, but because its made better.

@Brian re: advertising Think of advertising as the current iteration of “Findability” and “Personalization”, only driven by the producer, not the consumer. The 2 primary functions of advertising are 1) inform you of what’s available (Findability), and 2) tell you how the product relates to your needs and/or interests (Personalization). The issue you and many other have with advertising is it’s intrusiveness. But that’s changing as advertising becomes more and more personalized, (driven in large part by digital media that can track individual’s behaviors and activity over time) and delivers personalized messages that relate specifically to your interests and needs. As that model becomes more refined, advertising will become less intrusive and annoying and more useful and “enlightening” in terms of just delivering content your are interested in. Think of movie “trailers” (ads). Trailers for movies you really like don’t feel like intrusive advertising - primarily because it’s something entertaining to you so you enjoy watching it. Trailers for movies that don’t interest you are simply another ad. The more advertising becomes personalized, the more entertaining and useful it will become. That model is still evolving.

It costs nothing to make the second pill, but the first one is very expensive indeed. Manufacturing, even in places like China, requires a great deal more capital investment than it takes to unleash an mp3 on the Net. In the latter case, the Net requires some capital in the form of hardware, but most of it is commoditized and the cost of connecting it is distributed among the backbone providers, ISPs and end users. Almost none of that is true for pharmaceutical manufacturing (or cell phone manufacturing either).

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can�t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.�

You rock. Your blog rocks. I like your focus on intangibles. I think you’re on to something. I saw a lot of comments about how “it can’t be free! it can’t be free!”, but I think when we go down that road we loose sight of the ways that a 2.0 (or 3.0) environment will actually make money. Saying, “we have to make money,” is blocking people from seeing the patterns and trends already out there. When they can’t see what is actually happening in this environment, they can’t see how eventually they will make money from it. And to make money in this environment, I think you have to be willing to experiment in ways that may not make money, but will certainly, at the very least, create very interested and dedicated customers.

Again, you rock. Thanks for this blog. Annie

There isn’t much I can say that hasn’t been said already. All I know is that this is best single piece of writing I have come across from looking at academic journal articles, magazines, newspapers that actually fits perfectly with my research on sustainable business models in the Creative Industries, I wish I could bring you to the UK to speak at all of my workshops! And to top it all you are a spiritual person which makes me believe that if you follow your bliss, you end up with a brilliant blog!

I will be reading anything you publish on paper or online or on whatever medium comes next. All the best

This is brilliant. I have to much to ponder on and take in - thank you so much for writing this! As an entrepreneur and multiple small=business owner, this has given me some serious food for thought about the direction for my businesses and my personal and financial life in the next 1, 2, 5, 10, and 20 years. You are a particularly eloquent writer, and I am so happy that you provided the article in Italian too!

Great post!! I just have to copy it :)

Unfortunately, the US courts don’t feel the same way.

If all these services for personalization and findability were really doing their jobs effectively, there would be no need for advertising. Instead, people would pay for these services rather than paying money to vendors who have to buy ads in order to find audiences. It would be a much more pleasant model.

I personally can’t stand advertising and use AdBlockPlus and DVRs to block it out as much as possible. I would definitely pay to rid the world of advertising.

Is the use of power lines in your picture on purpose? It seems an unlikely (although vivid) way for “copies” to move through the network. I know there have been advances in power line networking but mainline power transmission towers are not what people think of when they think of copying data. On the other hand, we now know that the energy cost of information technology is non-trivial and a factor in global warming, so perhaps this is a comment on the cost of “free?”

Thought provoking, as always.

I suspect that two of your generative categories (findability and accessibility) are actually two expressions of the same issue: where’s that ‘thing’ I need? Accessibility refers to a ‘thing’ that I’ve already bought or used; findability refers to a ‘thing’ that I have not yet bought or used. Perhaps you can combine the two as “locatability”?

And this is where it connects (in part) to the function of advertising - letting me know where to locate the right thing when I’ve already decided I need it. (As opposed to the other part of advertising, telling me about something I didn’t know I needed yet.)

The weakness of the advertising model is that, as a consumer, I really need an agent working for me (not for the producer) to have confidence that I have found the best ‘thing’ at the best price.

I’d like to ask Major Bong about the book he mentioned - the Thiaboha Prophesy - I couldn’t find any details - do you know the author’s name or full title?

You rock. World needs more souls like you.

I found this blog to be very interesting and relevant. Kevin lists 8 categories of �attributes of things, ideas, or people� which cause them to be worth something —- in the sense that while certain elements of said categories can be had for free (usually due to electronic distribution and access), there exists something about these elements which many people will be willing to pay for.

As an example, one of the categories is �Accessibility�, and the example he gives is of a fictitious Acme Music Company, similar to an iTunes server. As consumers of music, we may be interested in keeping some of our favorite tunes around, but it�s even nicer if we can have access to any music we want, whenever we want, without necessarily having to store it locally. We also want to easily be able to see what other music is available, and to sample it. This is only possible through the combination of a large, central storehouse and the software to access it, and by extension, the ability of the storehouse to afford to provide the service. To do so, they need to make money —- so if users are willing to pay for the ease of access and the breadth of selection, such arrangements can survive even in a world where much of the actual CONTENT is available for free elsewhere.

The parallels with many other kinds of information are clear, and for those of us in education, quite relevant: gone are the days of massive bookshelves and card catalogs, since no matter how many physical materials one might have (or have ready access to) there is no possible way to compare with electronic access (which provides access to ALL information available, provided it can be found and is available for free or for a reasonable cost). Do we really want to store all this information locally?

Add to this massive list (of the obvious resources like journals and books) a second massive list of the new forms of media and communication (like blogs or podcasts), and the possibilities are truly endless. No longer will information gather dust on a shelf simply because it was not deemed �publishable�; it can be put out there virtually free. Additionally, no longer will some available information never be read by anyone because it�s tucked away on the top shelf; its searchable text and �meta tags� are stored for ready access by the right keywords.

The nature of copy-and-paste literacy may be frightening to some and a godsend to others, but it is here to stay and brings with it a completely new take on what it means to be educated or to be smart. As educators and learners, we must keep hammering away at these ideas and be willing to change our traditional thinking, or we will rapidly lose ground to progress. Copying is a double-edged sword in that while one gets ready access to information or answers, the process of discovery has been essentially sidestepped, and to fully understand what one has, more time needs to be spent with it. Whether one takes this time will depend on a number of factors, and indeed, many times it simply is not worth it for one reason or another. I have seen this time and time again when learning specific technicalities with computers (programming in particular), both with myself and with my peers. This is a rather special case, but the overall idea still holds: understanding new information requires a �place to put it�—-a context—-or it won�t have the meaning that it could. And with the vast amounts of new information available anytime, this issue will be important for the foreseeable future.

Thoughtful article that generated many “provocations” in the Edward de Bono sense. When we pay for an iPod and load it with tunes from ITMS aren’t we buying into the knowledge created by Apple’s people? They have over the years learned a design aesthetic that defines an authentic product (all others are copies of little value); they have learned how to dealmake with the movie and music moguls, and individual bands; they have learned how to put the pieces of a system together that delivers value for the customer; they have recognised consumer/customer/user needs at various levels and recognise our aspirations…. which makes other people in the industr(y)(ies) struggle to reproduce. We pay a lot (but the price is reducing) to get the box but ongoing membership of the ‘crowd’ is not too prohibitive and there is payback in terms of our own ‘authentic’ playlists which are discussed in pubs, clubs, radio programmes and used for real-time adaptation of live programmes and performances… now which bits are free and how do we (developers) cover our investment in them?

Thank you Mr. Kelly for your wise and helpful comments. They will enable us to help even more voters influence the politicians they elect and pay, so that their governments deliver them better serviceds and policies. FairGO

Beautiful prose, but where is the way you can make money you promised?

Don’t everyone quit your day job. If service is your product, you’d better get paid for it. Advertising is only a valuble commodity right now because it’s relatively scarce. At what point do consumers get so overwhelmed with adds that they no longer have any value? Someone has to actually produce something somewhere down the road, and they’d better not be trying to do it for free. This isn’t “Star Trek”. Why is everyone so eager to abandon tested principles of economics? Nothing is free. Absolutely nothing. A nation’s wealth is measured by what it produces, not by what it consumes. A company’s wealth is determined by what it sells, not by what it gives away. I’m afraid a lot of people are going to be left chasing their long tails. It’s right up there with the dot.com collapse. There has to be some substance somewhere.

Late to the dance but just as fascinated by your wonderful piece, Kelly. It just confirms to me 2 things:

1. Reality: Tech is caught between push and pull of economics
2. Behind the facade: Tech isn’t the cold-blooded and devil-may-care, rampaging elephant it appears to be but an idea still looking for a way towards not just being valuable but a cup-holder of ‘values’.

Oh well, free is surreal as it is about putting money in a world that struggles with the word ‘fair’.

Very interesting article. Your points are valid but as a graduate student in the biological sciences I have to take issue with your use of DNA as an example. I assure you that both cases in which you use DNA you are not presenting logical thoughts.

1. First of all, aspirin is not free; there are production costs involved and no company gives away aspirin. Aspirin is a specific molecule that binds to a specific receptor and there is no need to tailor it to anyone’s DNA, which doesn’t make sense in the context of aspirin. If you change aspirin it’s no longer aspirin. So you’re not “personalizing” aspirin. You’re just making a different drug.

2. Sequencing a genome is indeed expensive but you say it soon won’t be and that’s definitely wrong. In the next 20 years we hope to have genome sequencing down to $1,000 per person and I wouldn’t call that cheap by any measure. Also you will not find a single pharmaceutical company interested in paying you to sequence your genome. More likely it will be to your advantage to get your genome sequenced for predicting and treating diseases you have or will have. This will become a common medical practice that you and your insurance company pay for. As for future use of the genetic code there won’t be any more “interpretation” of your genome to you now than the interpretation you get when someone looks at your cancer biopsy and tells you how advanced your disease is.

The money is in the scrapbooking of the copies :-))

Interesting read, but at some point those deciding to support through their patronage a Radiohead song had to generate the money for that patronage from either selling a product themselves (that someone at some point had to pay for) or selling their labour to produce a product for someone else (that someone had to pay for). ‘Free’ is all well and good, but at some point people have to pay for it. Consumers may be willing to pay for qualities that you describe as “generatives” and not other stuff that is freely available online, however at some point a consumer still has to pay a creator for their work else the creator starves! The creator, say a writer sitting at a computer, still has production costs of food, electricity, rent etc, etc. If those paying one creator for their work, are also creators themselves dependent on patronage alone then the whole virtual economy is propped up in a circular fashion. Your argument in this sense seems syllogism.

Great article!

I’m loving your website; first, i read your “1000 True Fans” following a link on Just Plain Folks forum and now i’m checking out other posts, i like what you’re saying :)

Fantastic. I just came across this blog today and am already an addict.

This is providing great inspiration and direction for current business plans we are working on. I hope to be able to point to this one day and say “This article drove that decision and is why it worked.”

Ah, the criminal hacker mind at work. I find this post to be counterproductive to building a viable and civilized Metaverse, and I find it to be representative of a tiny, sectarian coders’ mentality that doesn’t represent even the mainstream thinking of all computer programmers, let alone Internet users. Let’s get over all our ga-ga infantile belief that this concept represents some future of work and a solution to the problems of online economies, please, so as not to live in delusion.

It needs to been for what it is: an extremist school of thought, a variant of Lessigism or Stallmanism, but not “the truth”. Only one possible but only one sectarian take on the potentials and pitfalls of the Internet. Not a road we have to take.

No, not everything on the Internet has to be copied; people’s intellectual property in digital form should be protected, and in a place like Second Life, in fact it is is protected to a point with a permissions system and a TOS. And that’s ok. We need more robust forms of that. It’s perfectly fine. Napster doesn’t exist anymore; you have to pay per tune. And that’s good. We need to pay per tune because my God, making tunes and producing them is work.

Copying and distribution of ideas and information and commentary — that’s all good. That need not be impeded. But there are laws defining this, such as “fair use”. It’s not copying that is the foundation of wealth, no, that would be like saying “the foundation of wealth is my wallet because it holds my money.” Infantile!

No, content is the foundation of wealth, creation of it, management of it, and all services related to it. Content is not copy: content is the antithesis of the Copybot mentality we see here. Content is created because of the ability to get paid, not because of fake generative capacities that haven’t stood any test of time or peer-reviewed scientific study, but are merely a faddish idea.

And how curious that what can in fact be copied is then suddenly, arbitrarily, declared as “original”. Trust can too be copied. Perform enough reliable services, sell enough books that people are happy with on amazon, or dolls on ebay, and you get reputation points that essentially copy, because each new person who comes up then sees your avatar or your name, with its points, and they draw a conclusion: that person is 78 percent or 98 percent reliable. The reputational footprint is endlessly copiable.

In Second Life, where copies are free, they aren’t therefore automatically perfectly distributed. That’s a myth. Not all things free are perfectly distributable on the Internet, either. For all kinds of reasons people are willing to pay for an item if it is “just in time,” without the friction of the search — which is the thing you completely forgot about in your copy-happy little universe — and without the friction of the save, which you also forgot about, and without the friction of attention, which you forgot about. Attention costs. We all have only so much of it. We pay it out; attracting it (advertising) and maintaining it (management); these are legitimate and necessary economic activities for which people, with their needs, must be paid.

Why did I pay for Windows XP? My God, it cost nearly $100 or something when I bought it. Because I got sick of hacker dudes who set up my computer or fixed it copying their many-copied version of their usually virus-laden computers. I got tired of it crashing. I got tired of not being able to call the company for free service or trouble-shooting, because I didn’t have my own jewel box number. So I bought a licensed copy. My computer stopped crashing. I could get service now. And that’s why you pay for software, duh.

Your generatives are good up to a point — immediacy — that’s what I mean by “just in time”, the early-bird copy of something coveted, like a game or movie. But regrettably, in the real field practice of a world that already exists with some of the “generative rules” (sounds like Chomskyan transformation grammar, and is as politically correct) that you admire, in fact the way people try to retain value leaking out of IP is by brow-beating. Harassing those who copy. Suspecting those with similar designs of theft. Hating on yard sales. In fact, that repressive behaviour makes people only willing to pay for a free copy even more; those do-gooders who want to enhance their reputation by giving out copies fly into a fury if anyone charges even a dollar — but that’s reasonable, given that you have to use up server space to display the item: yes, server space is a finite resource. It must be paid for.

Personalization — ah, the script kiddies just steal the copies and tweak them. They don’t need anyone to tweak something when they are already kitted out with every editing program they’ve hacked off warez or wherever.

Your notion of interpretation is fanciful. Editors are going to stop editing books and custom-edit a story line just for me and take out the dirty words? Are you daft? That’s ridiculous. They are busy making the next set of books with content, with ORIGINAL content, that they will sell in various ways, because that’s the sensible thing, paying for and keeping valuable original content, not pretending that a Hallmark-card treatment of drawing curlicues in the margins is a service that will make a living for writers or publishers.

Besides, coding kiddies will script something that does this automatically if somebody needs that done, i.e. a silly “Hello!” and a “are you done reading chapter one yet?” from some bot. So again, no need to pay. But…I can’t have a relationship with an author unless we write to each other something unique; something not copyable; original content. The authors I ever heard from answered me because I said something original, not a copy.

The mode of high-octane paid support for free software is a geekworld notion that can’t apply to an entire economy, even one that people increasingly live online. Because lots of people need garden-variety normal support that isn’t the level of what Red Hat does. They need to learn the routine, the sequences; they need to know what numbers to plug into the various stupid and counterintuitive menus that geeks have warped into most technology. So they need to pay, because geeks’ time does cost something.

In fact, the entire open-source fiction is based on this idea of people volunteering and sharing — but they do it always from a paid-for platform, a hidden substrate of support they are never willing to admit, or factor into their glamorous shareware/freeware/opensource imaginations.

They do it because Mom pays, or the state pays a student loan, or the big IT company pays, or the university pays with a foundation grant and it pays not only a salary, it pays sometimes in lost productivity. Wives pay; children pay; in lack of attention. Somebody always has to pay when the hacker/coder/copyleftist mentality runs wild, spending time on his coding and his generatives.

Always. SOMEBODY pays. It’s just not them, so they imagine you can build a world like this.

With your notion of “interpretation,” you’re saying what I’m saying with the notion of content and originality and service. But not quite, because you are still imagining it is new-age. No need to get fancy — it’s just service. And service needs to get paid per account, and that means per copy. I don’t mind paying $19.95 or $52.95 with a company here or in Czech Republic for an anti-virus software that they update daily for me. I could hack and slash and get their free copy, but will it update? I’ll need a key for that — and isn’t that a good thing? Because I’m paying for their time. I’m keeping their families alive. They need to earn a living. I need a daily update. It’s all good, daily service, but not based on a free copy; based on a trial copy, and then a payment. Your world is devoid of trial copies, and imagines you can just send everything around for free, hack it, tweak it, and everyone will just volunteer to work it, and put out a tip jar.

Again, authenticity isn’t about the key; it’s about the update, the service, the content as well, as they keep discovering new bugs to fix.

Embodiment is at best a fleeting, temporal concept, and not a big market possibility for all things digital. You must not have seen Second Life. You could whip up a book there to hold something that will look and feel real, and even have the sound of pages fluttering, and the look of pages fluttering. Why go to the expense and trouble of actually making wood pulp from trees? It can all be done digitally, really.

But…somebody has to work. Somebody has to create something original. And that means we have to pay. And you have to stop hacking, and be kept from hacking if not by permissions, moral suasion, obfuscation, penalties, then stronger measures.

Patronage. Oh, dear. Kids are so naive! They imagine they can busk on the sidewalk forever, and live off tips. What is their plan for purchasing a car to drive to work, a home, kids’ clothing, food? I mean, seriously. We can’t have a world where all the creators, all the writers, artists, designers who have to interpet things all have to live off tip jars, waiting like poor starving artists for their patrons, having to paint rich fat ladies instead of cathedral ceilings because they can’t find patrons for what they want to do.

And what of all those interpretive physicians? They have to wait for somebody on ebay or the futuristic Massive Distribution Center of your dreams to give them a good rating, and send them micropayments that they may cash out for a fee to PayPal.

Findability isn’t the same thing as search. Search is my freedom to look, to browse, to select. It’s the willingness to pay — in attention, and in money. Findability is your freedom to advertise, market, front, push, try to get me to give something, perhaps only the ability to flick a rating or pass a copy. And studios are already having a hard time trying to make the service of presentation and advertising to help the searcher simply not enough to live on. That’s why CDs have grown more and more expensive. That’s why artists’ contracts are now called 360 degree contracts where not the mere CD is the objective, but a cluster of media appearances and events, like concerts, or a presence in Second Life, are all part of the package.

But by itself, with everybody copying, with everybody stealing, it won’t be possible to get studios to keep fronting the advance investment in staff, tours, infrastructure, advertising that supports bands. When everbody copies and everybody has a niche following and everybody has only a tip jar they have to keep running NPR-like telethons and mass mailings to get people to pay into, you don’t have a robust, thriving economy, you have college kids on drugs who haven’t figured out how to really support themselves yet.

Let me tell you something. The Great Copy Machine in the Sky has a lowly counterpart called the Lowly Trucker on the Road. He’s hauling ass, paying all kinds of expenses for tires and gasoline and DOT permits to try to make a deadline to deliver what you ordered off the Internet — sometimes it’s your dinner, sometimes it’s a book, sometimes it’s a couch from Ikea. The roads are clogged with these analog folks, working hard, driving all night, listening to C&W, drinking coffee at truck stops. They don’t copy; they’re originals.

Driving all day, the truck driver whom you hate because he doesn’t vote for your candidate or goes to church or slings a gun, he’s not on the Internet. Tired at night, he might be in his cabover, or in a motel, or slumped on the couch, watching TV, where he may be the last one looking at commercials — everyone else is watching their free movies from Bittorrent.

And…Most people don’t have the geek’s hatred of ads, because ads are what tell them about products, and they aren’t stupid. They have the Internet to do comparison shopping, to talk to each other about products, and they don’t break into a rage over seeing a billboard, or a commercial, they can handle it, in fact, they find some of them quite entertaining. You’re pretending that advertising is extinct. We can look around and see that it has only moved: to bus shelters, taxi cabs, elevators, cell phones, Internet portal pages, Facebook, your game, your world.

So, your generatives are only very partial; or even just downright wrong as concepts. That’s because they just represent one school of thought, one nearly-religious conviction of geekworld, that code is law, that everything is copyable, that everything should be free for the entitlement-happy.

Seriously. The deep flaw in your argumentation is in your very last sentence if you would but remove the blinders. So I’m writing, all right, because until you do get it, you’ll be a menace, copying and copybotting and making kids think they can steal, and undermine adults’ ability to make a living.

If generatives need so much work to survive, if the tip jar must always be passed around and pushed in your face; if you must endlessly tie up the entire Internet providers’ line with your giant Bittorrent download, if you must constantly post on blogs and berate people for not accepting that they should just give away everything, so you must accomplish by ideology and coercion what you can’t achieve by common-sense, what do you have? You have, ultimately, only a vast hippie commune, or worse, you have a totalitarian system. Yes, that’s what is required for such a scheme to survive — and trust me, it’s been done, there have been central distributive systems with endless goods redistributed in planned system, and they only led to crime, and the deaths of millions. They don’t work. People need originals. They need private property, not distribution of everybody else’s. They need to get paid.

Of course, there’s something quite wrong with this picture, that they understand the minute the electricity goes out, the coal is unavailable to burn, the miners died in a mining collapse, the water dries up, the nuclear power station shuts down due to human error (perhaps a hacker’s computer program didn’t work). Then the Internet dies, with all its 8 generatives. The Great Copy Machine in the Sky turns out to be the Great Pet Rock in the Sky, and people go back to digging in their gardens.

Prokofy

About the tipping thing, I don’t think there are any real studies. Nick Szabo and Clay Shirky seem to have written some stuff. This is what I can turn up right now http://brianwill.net/blog/2007/05/20/tipping-as-a-replacement-for-micropayments/ http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

Anyway we’re very curious as we’re trying out tipping in our company (in http://tipit.to) as a way of letting the consumer assess the value of a product when most content is either free or de facto free.

i read in a book a couple years back…i think it was Thiaboha Prophesy, the French dude that claims he was taken to another planet….he describes their economy in this way….where everything is free and shared and value is proportionate to the demand of the good. so in other words everything is free and shared and when it “goes out of style” and nobody wants it anymore or everyone has it, it’s value is decreased and phased out. A good is only valuable if it has gainful deployment within the community, and the manufacturer of the good gets ….for lack of a better word “perks” for his creation…ie. better standing in the community or
a recognition of good deeds by your peers…..in a free society like this this would be a very substantial reward.

this was the gist of it….the rest of the book was way out there…I can’t believe this guy has followers. I chatted with one once, and from that I fathomed why, their minds are like a child.

Thank you for a hard work putting up together this value added schemes. If I may contribute a bit, I like very much the simple idea that you cannot steal an idea you can only share it. You tell me your idea, then we both have it. While I take your book or cereals, you don’t have it any longer. Copying follows the same principle. I copy something from someone. This someone still has it, ergo I am not stealing. On another point, I was wondering about off shoring at one point when a potential client told me he could get the same service (a web site) for cheaper if he chose some company in India. Service that cannot be off shored imply proximity. Proximity has value as it brings trust and bonds. It also brings a knowledge of the other’s environnement. Maybe you could add proximity to your list of value gerating concept that cannot be copied.

R. Woodhead: User-decided prices, from tipping, to shareware, to set-your-own price are not quite the same as free, but certainly a viable strategy. Have you ever seen any formal studies on this subject?

Walter, yes, context is the key concept.

Check this out: http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/02/20/myspaceworkingonmusicservice_reports/

MySpace to launch an advertising-supported free music service

Here’s another kind of response.

1. Seems like CONTEXT is a recurring theme…fitting data/information to a specific context is a difficult/valuable task.

2. Resources (physical & non-physical) are only one gating factor in translating knowledge into decisions, actions, and capabilities. Even if (some) resources are free, work is required to contextualize them for a specific need/decision/action.

Kevin,

I wrote a post about the ‘free’ issue. After reading your writing and a few other posts, I had to write about my concerns and alternative ideas.

http://hyokon.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-addition-to-free-part-1-free-is-not.html

Hyokon

Freeness is a byproduct of capitalism’s fecundity. Tech developments compounding over a century to make cheaper - reductio ad absurdum - but how to accomodate within society’s 19c political/legal structures? Radical revolution is knocking on the door, boundless opportunity disguised as eco threat. No, not disguised, really; Mercury the god of communications delivers eviction orders & death threats as well as birthday presents. Comms technologies gave birth to new empires, but were the angel of death to those who sought to control or suppress them, rather than adjust to them. Read all about it at http://groups.google.com/group/aristomafia?hl=en(free). Old git Tom

Very valuable article indeed! Most consulting firms could get some inspiration from this. Today, the recipes are free (or nearly, as they are published in the zillions of business boos that are flooding our society) but as we know the recipe alone doesn’t make for a good dish. It also takes a good cook. Similarly, in consulting, telling the client what to do is easy (and free, accessible, copyable) but being successful in managing the project to implementation is quite a challenge!

All the best, and keep on (free) quality blogging!

Your comment about interpretation is interesting but I think that is the wrong business model if you want to have happy customers. Providing free software that requires $$$$ of support in order to use it means that your software is not user-friendly and a pain to use. Look at Linux… such a pain to do anything in it. Yes, it is free but the learning curve is huge. Who wants to spend the time unless you are into that sort of thing?

I’ve been groping towards similar ideas for many years. The one that is firmest in my mind is the patronage generative, I’ve been making a nice living for about 10 years using a website whose income model is based on tipping — in fact, letting the user decide the price increases my income.

The common thread of all the generatives, to greater and lesser degree, is that they depend on a personal connection between creator and consumer. They build on reciprocal trust.

This leads to some interesting effects. I answer all my user’s email questions without bothering to check if they’ve tipped me. What I find, however, is that almost everyone who emails ends up tipping (vs. 10% of account creators, though the % for people who use the site seriously is very near 100%). Some of the people who email make a point of telling me they’ve tipped, but my feeling (I haven’t got hard numbers) is that those that tip afterwards tend to tip more, because they’ve seen a demonstration of trust by me, and feel obligated to reciprocate.

What is most telling are the tips I get with comments like “I’m on unemployment, but you deserve this $10”. What does that say about people’s desire to reciprocate? Interestingly, the best tactic for me at this point (both ethically and financially) is to refuse the tip, give them a free year on the site, and ask them to do what’s fair at the end of the year.

There are free-riders, of course, but they rarely actually cost me any time — and time is the thing that is most precious to me.

I put up a page that explains the idea that you may find interesting; http://tipping.selfpromotion.com/

I really should have gotten a patent on the business model, just for the giggle-factor. Oh well…

Here’s a response . Good article. (Now I need to read the other responses that showed up after I wrote about it).

Check out ArtistShare.com

Thank you Kevin for that summary of what economics is all about: too much neo-classical short-cuts for my blood at the other econo-blogs.

I would like to answer to the heart-felt, subjective testimony by Konrad Product, an alas very true aspect of the digital revolution, seen from the point of view of unemployed information worker. Times are hard, some would say challenging: I cannot doubt they are plenty of real journalists out there, looking for demanding, involving, reporting — in spite of having a vast majority of copy-pasters ruining what used to be News. I still believe that long essays are the format to go and make money with reporting: the New Yorker, or Granta are still on business, aren’t they?

A daily here (in France, called Lib’ration) was praised for dedicating a full page to a month-long investigation, every day: the paper is now bought by those who want to be seen with it, or read that particular page. Maybe ask them whether they would pay for a translation of your piece: what you describe is the kind of story I’ve read there.

If what you have is more a thirty-page long thing, then XXI might be your shot: it’s a surprising �magazine� that just went out, inspired by the afore-mentionned NYer & Granta, trying to react to that depressing impoverishing of news. It’s not instant, it’s not superficial: it is deep, thoughtful and very big on the visual arts (comic, photo). Because of a surprise success, they might have more offers then what they need, but maybe try them too. You might need a painter, or a photograph and a translator—but these should be your new friends now. If a particular outlet doesn’t carry your ideas, then make your own; if all publishers are a**-holes, go to Lulu.com, and sell you story your-self. It’s not your job, but it needs to be done—and if you really are bad with people (which I doubt) there are tons of bloggers desperate for great content to promote.

The lesson is: Konrad, you cannot sell you story as is; you have to add something, probably one of the elements listed by Kevin.

In a world of “free” we pay for something that could be free, because it bridges our technology gaps. This article remembers me of the theory of economic alchemy by Paul Zane Pilzer. The economics of abundance, the economics of free rests on six crucial principles of alchemic thinking. The sixth law relates to the economic potential of free: YOUR IMMEDIATE ECONOMIC POTENTIAL IS DEFINED BY YOUR TECHNOLOGY GAP.

“Technology wants to be free” - an amusing concept, sort of like “guns kill people”. What it really means is “we want our technology to be free”. It overlooks the notion that until technology drops like manna from heaven, it’s going to be made by somebody. Somebody who needs a place to sleep, needs lunch, dinner; somebody who may even have a family to support; somebody who needs net access to create and distribute new technology; and companies that need fairly elaborate machinery to do little things like nanotech.

“It costs nothing to make a pill.” OK, then, whip me up a few tablets of tenofovir or Baraclude. I’ll even pay postage.

Kevin, suspect you’re at least partly right… you usually are.

Brilliant and useful insights!

One point IMO should be considered: “free” is not the same as “infinitesimally cheap”. Copies, if similar to information stored in a “superconductive wire”, suffer the “exothermic” constraints of supraconductivity, which means they do have a cost.

I guess this is reflected in your “accessibility” and “embodiment” generatives.

Could it be useful to consider general relativity concepts such as “events horizons” to explain why something is (more) valuable for one actor than another (and link your immediacy and personalization generatives)?

Thanks again for your important contribution!

Great stuff!

How about “Associativity”, which includes the concept of Community, mentioned above (fan club, social network) and all the varieties of context: “show me more like this”, “here’s the next thing you may want to know”, “here’s an antonym”, etc. — information that leads to other information.

Another item for your list is uniqueness and the status that brings, Veblen-style

Kevin, I enjoyed the piece and the comments. SO IN THE END NOTHING WORTH HAVING IS REALLY FREE!!! If info is free, production and access are not. If a version of every particle of data and media is capied and accessible then getting a quality, desirable version will cost plenty. I can get limited TV, streaming audio and video and many radio channels for “free” but I have to buy the equipment to get it and then suffer through advertising to enjoy it. If I want to watch or listen to whatever, whenever, with limited or no advertising, then I have to pay for more equipment and access privileges (like my dish, DVR, High-Speed connection etc). NOTHING IS REALLY FREE!!! I guess it is “better than free” … if you are on the right end of the distribution channel.

Brilliant and useful insights!

One point IMO should be considered: “free” is not the same as “infinitesimally cheap”. Copies, if similar to information stored in a “superconductive wire”, suffer the “exothermic” constraints of supraconductivity, which means they do have a cost.

I guess this is reflected in your “accessibility” and “embodiment” generatives.

Could it be useful to consider general relativity concepts such as “events horizons” to explain why something is (more) valuable for one actor than another (and link your immediacy and personalization generatives)?

Thanks again for your important contribution!

I think you are right that people want to pay artists and content producers. Most people realize that “free” isn’t really “free” and they are willing to pay to encourage people to produce more quality stuff, because they want the person to get what he deserves or if for no other reason, out of guilt. I personally would prefer to donate money to website owners who provide me with resources I can use over seeing ads all over the place.

As a musician trying to get his product out I love this article because it speaks to me. One thing I’ve always told artist friends or bands getting into the business is; their product is no more valuable than a pack of cigarettes. What would make someone smoke this brand over that? What would make someone buy your disc over another and why would someone download your piece of music over another even if it is free? The truth is the only a handful of artists have ever made real money in the music business when you compare it the amount of people the business has buried. It is an industry based on failure. Technology only levels the playing field in regards to distribution (you still have to build a fanbase for longterm success.) The eight generatives I feel are essential to anyone looking to build a career in this business today. Yes, there are things that can be added or tweaked ever so slightly but for what it’s worth I feel like I’ve just been let out of jail reading this article. You’ve put into words what I had been feeling for a long time and I thank you.

“When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.”

Untrue! Do you remember your previous life Kevin!?

3) Plentitude, Not Scarcity

As manufacturing techniques perfect the art of making copies plentiful, value is carried by abundance, rather than scarcity, inverting traditional business propositions.

The value of an invention, company, or technology increases exponentially as the number of systems it participates with increase linearity.

The abundance upon which the network economy is built is one of opportunity.

Networks spew fecundity because by connecting everything to everything, they increase the number of potential relationships, and out of relationships come products, services and intangibles.

Kevin Kelly from “New Rules for the New Economy” http://www.panarchy.org/kelly/newrules.1998.html

Let me add that the more copies they are, the more the actual owner’s savoir-faire or that his originals are worth! Especially if he was able to popularize low resolution copies of the works & never sold out his catalog or the company that made it happen.

Hope you don’t mind me breaking the consensus that your assay generates. People are so uncritical these days they forget conveniently the history & context of it all.

They are so many other arguments I could make against your thesis but I’ve made one maybe that’s enough to spark a much needed, good old flame war!

Come on people wake up! Flattery will only get you so far! Get real!

Martin Chartrand aka : VeeJayTsunaMiX, producer, director of TsunaMiX HD The Next Wave!

Great Article! You are the ghost writer of Chris Anderson Book “Free”? Or is he just copying? ;)

Most of your points would be the distinctive marks of a really good brand. In the media industry there are still no really good brands out there. Why? Why? Why?

McLuhan has plenty to say on the somewhat philosophical vein you are working here. ‘advertisers would pay you to look at their products if they could figure out how to’, or something to that effect.

hats off to your excellent work here- it is possibly the only germane work i have read on the subject.

At least in educational settings the quality of “interpretation” can be expanded to include the ideas of “guidance and explanation.” The value of a good class is not the syllabus, the text or the classnotes, it is the value of the instructor. It is the opportunity to seek further clarification or to get to ask questions that link your current knowledge to some new idea.

This is why MIT can afford to give away its course content and still find students willing to buy the opportunity to be in the classroom with an instructor.

Somewhere is the qualities of “accessibility” and “findability” is the quality of organization. The value of an article in Wikipedia is more valuable than the same article that stands alone because the article embedded in the organizational structure of an encyclopedia can be easily linked to deeper information and related ideas. There is great value in this “organizational structure.”

Some of these rebuttals falsly segregate content creators (writers musicians etc.)

The argument that creators need paid is a false syllogism. Anyone can create… in their “free” time. Web 2.0 has taught us that people with day jobs will create; not for money, but because they choose to.

What about locality? Physical locality?

Wherever our minds wander we always ‘have to’ return to the here, near and now.

An identical thing that is physically closer