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... )

Comments 6

pixxelpuss January 16 2008, 17:54:23 UTC

Hmm... I agree with some of what the poster is saying. I do think that larger companies have an unfair advantage in the marketplace when they can make things free (or bundle them) and use this strategy to crush their competitors. That's a fair point. Although the end of the article degenerates into middle-aged boo-hooing about kids today and how lazy and ungrateful they are ( ... )

sarastro_us January 16 2008, 17:59:23 UTC

True enough. The reason I pulled out the comment is that I've wondered for some time about the nature of the changing ethical structure around free products due to the proliferation of information available on the internet. I'm not really making a judgment about whether it's good or bad yet, but the idea that everything should be available for free on the web in definitely growing.

pixxelpuss January 16 2008, 18:06:54 UTC

That's definitely fair to wonder about. I love Richard Stallman, but it is not a foregone conclusion that all information should be free (and as he says it's not the "free beer" kind of freedom). In the new Sam & Max episodic game, a group of old computers is talking about how they get all of their information from wikipedia, and one says "Information wants to be Wrong!"

My problem with the entire IP situation is that I feel like it was designed to protect individual innovators, but instead only really protects enormous corporations (who in my opinion do not really need the protection).

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 ( ... )

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