Is Charging for your Internet Content Appropriate?
April 19th, 2010Here in the UK, The Times and The Sunday Times announced recently that they would be following the Financial Times in charging for on line content from the Summer. This saddened me and it feels to me like a missed opportunity on the part of these prestigious newspapers as well as a misunderstanding of how we are all dependent on the founders of The Internet for our activities online.
I feel the same way about the Oxford English Dictionary. What an opportunity they have missed not to make this available online to everyone. They would instantly achieve wonderful goodwill were they to do this.
These prestigious organizations seem to me to have seriously misunderstood the nature of The Internet that was built out of a genuine passion for improving our world by people of stature, vision and principle. In defending their intellectual property, these organizations risk being sidelined by the rest of us. Such institutions instead of embracing The Internet and throwing their doors open are retreating into their castles and pulling up their drawbridges. However, this cannot be good for them in the long run. People will soon learn to sideline such organizations. They will not bother to storm their ramparts. They will simply ignore them and move on to other places that share the Internet’s generosity of spirit. They will move to where the action now is.
We only use The Internet by the grace of those who developed it for all of us. We have little moral right, I feel, to use it and then section it off. It is akin to those drug companies who have been trying to patent parts of the human genome and charge us for the use of what they then regard as their intellectual property. Who owns the content of our own bodies? The Internet is a living body too and we weaken the whole by restricting access to parts of it.
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