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.

Yet even today, despite being confronted with mountains of evidence of failure, some Internet leaders continue to propose the very same prescription for the future of newspapers.

A vice president of Google told publishers earlier this year that they needed to embrace the “ubiquity” of content on the web, and that the survivors will be those that adapt to this new reality.

And Wired’s Chris Anderson will soon publish a book called “Free” that argues that businesses of the future can only make money by giving their products away.

But for the media at least, the verdict is in and the time has come to reject these claims once and for all.

Tinkering with your current online business models by trying to develop a more organic relationship with readers or by beefing up link journalism (the latest buzzword) may help, but it is not going to fix the current situation.

Think we can see where this is heading:

The key to the game is to build a loyal audience, which makes the rampant misuse of valuable copyrights and the dilution of trusted brands online today so harmful to publishers.

That’s precisely why newspapers have objected to Google News aggregation sites. And why commercial publishers have opposed the search-within-a-site feature that allows users to search a publisher’s site from within Google’s own pages – where Google controls the experience, supplies the ads and reaps the economic rewards.

Rubin has a point. But not – perhaps yet – an answer.