Better than Free (2008)
kk.orgI find it interesting that he started the essay talking about trust as an example of something that can't be copied, but omits it from his 8 points.
I think it should be the very first point in his list. Trust in software is a thing that is increasingly lacking in the general population, and not without reasons. Being actually trustworthy is increasingly valuable.
Related (and mostly surprisingly sparse) threads:
Better Than Free (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28129338 - Aug 2021 (3 comments)
Better Than Free (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21165460 - Oct 2019 (5 comments)
Better than Free (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14431233 - May 2017 (52 comments)
Better Than Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500222 - March 2009 (1 comment)
Better Than Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=384848 - Dec 2008 (2 comments)
Better than free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108559 - Feb 2008 (6 comments)
Thanks- did do a search before posting but (to my surprise) I only found 1 of the earlier posts.
On investigation this is because I searched the https:// url of the article. Note to self to be more thorough in future.
One missed point is recourse.
When something goes wrong with a digital product and the problem needs to be resolved, you will only get help if you've paid and there is a business behind the product and a legal system in place to allow for recourse - getting your money back, resolving the problem etc.
If you downloaded that product for free, you have no recourse because there is no authority providing any service beyond the data itself.
> Ownership often sucks [...] Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them
Funny, I think the opposite.
I was going to say the same thing. I really hate subscriptions, especially for software, and won't do them.
> These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse.
> In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.
Well said!
Prescient comment on what becomes valuable when the cost of production essentially becomes irrelevant. Becoming more important as time passes.
The cost of production for the base product hasn't become irrelevant, the cost of the inductive product has become irrelevant. The cost for an AAA single player game going gold is expensive, but once done - selling the next copy costs next to nothing. Same with the budget of a movie like Way of Water - it costs hundreds of millions to make, but distribution costs are very low after that.
Fair point, probably should have said something like “[marginal cost of re-]production”
Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it
will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can’t
erase something once it’s flowed on the internet.
To me, Internet's permanentness should be treated according to Murphy's law: you should plan for everything you wish would go down to stay up indefinitely and everything you wish would stay up to go down at some point.
Internet is like the IRS, it will never forget something that resonates with its structure, but some stuff you will never find again. Your nudes and memes ? replicated everywhere and ready to spill. That amazing article about an interesting topic .. 404.
As one of my friends put it, "The internet is a machine that erases everything good about you, but preserves a million copies of your worst tweet."
Something that's reminded me of this: the ongoing hunt for the original "Jeff the Killer" image. Nobody can find it, despite deep digging and lots of time spent. Even content linked to a "viral" internet story is hard to come by.
Ironically it may be hard to find precisely because its edit got so massively replicated. Thus we can conclude that the most effective way for something to get lost on the Internet is to shift all discourse related to it onto something that will become much more popular.
How about this: If it was valuable and you're trying to stop all unauthorized copies, then the internet never forgets. Some drivel I posted some time back on some forum somewhere? Yeah, it's probably gone.
I think this trope is more in conjunction with the Streisand effect. Things you don't want people to see will stay up indefinitely.
Saturday Night Live did a sketch about Olivia Rodrigo's song "Drivers License", it was a hoot... you can't find it on the internet without a ton of digging.[1] It was previously freely available, now it's mostly locked behind paywalls.
Our culture is thus stolen from us, little bits at a time.
[1] https://twitter.com/nbcsnl/status/1393642340078731269You say forever, but I surf alone with out history
The Internet is a copy machine, but often copies reside all in one branch of a tree standing in a walled garden, until someone comes along with an axe, chops that branch off and burns the wood.