Much consternation this morning in the incestuous world of the self-important Romanian blogger (honestly: if you understand Romanian you really should read some of the stuff these fools – who actually think they have something to say – post on their penis-extension blogs).
Anyway, turns out that the Romanian Copyright Protection Agency (ORDA) wants to – shock-horror – start charging these monkeys (and anyone, for that matter) who posts clips from You Tube and such like on their sites/blogs. Quite how ORDA would then distribute revenue to the copyright holder is beyond me, but the system does work, as those small but welcome cheques that eventually turn up in the post boxes of aging film and rock stars testify.
Alas, there is an entire generation of people out there who simply have no concept of what copyright protection is. Brought up in a world of You Tube, Napster, Kazaa, Torrents and Creative Commons, they simply think everything should be free. Add in the Romanian angle (pirated software has long been a way of life here, while many Romanian internet users simply can’t afford to pay for music and films, so don’t) and it is no surprise that you have a seething cesspit of online theft.
What these muppets need to understand is that in the real world, outside of their bedrooms, everything has a price. Someone, somewhere, pays for this content to be produced. What they singularly fail to understand is that if everyone stops paying for content, no content will be produced (no decent content, anyway. There will always be someone willing to post his amateurish videos on You Tube).
Andrew Keen has identified this syndrome as The Tyranny of Free Content, killing our culture and destroying our economy.
As an author who on Monday discovered that one of the UK’s leading travel guide publishers (Bradt) has ripped off a large amount of his copyrighted content, I am not feeling all that charitable right now towards anyone who steals: whether that theft is in the form of downloading torrents, using pirated software or advocating the distribution of copyrighted material via You Tube.
Cretins, the lot of them.
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Actually I am being a bit of a black kettle calling pot here as the whole In Your Pocket biz model is based around complimentary guides/content (we never actually use the word ‘free’)…
As for Keen, he didn’t exactly say we are all monkeys, he just said that any monkey can now get published.
I’m living proof of that!
On the other hand, I am sure you are familiar with the other side of the argument claiming that content should be free while content creators may/can/will find different models to monetize – perhaps you heard of the latest Radiohead’s online free album release? Or maybe about NYT making its content freely available online?
Yes, it’s true, content must be paid for, one way or the other, directly or indirectly. IMHO the challenge is for creators to figure out a model around the content they’re creating (as opposed to the content is the model) since the switch to a substitute is very likely to happen.
And times are changing and technology makes it cheaper and easier to get access to lots of it so that the information asymmetries are narrowing down to a point that in a market abundance of content (be it free or paid for) its cost creation is marginally close to zero.
That is not to disagree that Romanians are having the bad habit of not paying for stuff, online or offline, while getting them from more or less illegal sources.
ps. Isn’t Andrew Keen the same guy claiming that web 2.0 transforms us into monkeys?
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