Microsoft’s top Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty chap, Tom Rubin, had some inter­est­ing points to make at the UK AOP:

Start­ing back in the early 1990s, some lead­ing Inter­net pun­dits espoused the motto “inform­a­tion wants to be free” and implored con­tent own­ers to simply give away their con­tent and mon­et­ize it through sec­ond­ary means – such as con­certs and tee-shirts for musi­cians and, in the case of media, the prom­ise of a strong income stream by adopt­ing a busi­ness model con­sist­ing of free and lib­eral dis­tri­bu­tion plus online advertising.

And that’s exactly what most news­pa­pers did. By the late 1990s, almost all news­pa­pers put their valu­able report­ing and exclus­ive com­ment­ary online and allowed it to pro­lif­er­ate, eas­ily access­ible and free.

They did just as the new model pro­fessed and sold advert­ising to mon­et­ize the increased audi­ence they were attracting.

Well, here we are ten years later bom­barded almost daily by announce­ments of news­pa­per lay­offs and closures.

The evid­ence is in, and I think we can safely say that the “inform­a­tion wants to be free” approach not only does not work, actu­ally it has been a dis­aster for almost all news­pa­pers. Con­tinue read­ing →