Comments | sarastro_us: First one free, second one half price

sarastro_us

First one free, second one half price

Jan 16, 2008 08:55

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 ( Read more... )

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sarastro_us January 16 2008, 18:45:06 UTC

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 ( ... )

pixxelpuss January 16 2008, 18:52:05 UTC

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 January 16 2008, 19:00:41 UTC

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

;-)

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