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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it. One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.By Cory Doctorow at 12:13 am Saturday, Mar 14 Clay Shirky explains how all the "visionary planning" in the newspaper business in the 90s amounted to variations on this theme: "Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!" This fallacy drives every conversation about selling digital units of content as though they were physical units of atoms, using DRM to stop copying or divide the uses of content into millions of infinitely fungible "licenses" ("You've bought the right to listen to this song on this player, on Wednesday, only if you've got curly hair and you stand on one leg at the same time"), and suing/"educating" your customers about why they should pay you for stuff that you're not offering in their preferred format. As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better?
