Читать книгу Information Wants to Be Shared - Joshua Gans - Страница 13

Free distribution implies that the value of information would be maximized if everyone who wanted to could consume it and that this should be our goal. Moreover, the value created by widespread consumption is critical in justifying costs associated with creating that information.

The free information approach proposes that the mechanism by which full value can be realized is to set a price at zero and allow people to take what they want. But does that really do the job? After all, just because information is freely available does not mean it is actually consumed. And without consumption, information’s value to any one individual is zero. What the mechanism of free information neglects is that information still must compete for attention—a precious commodity difficult to snare in a world of abundance. Offering information for free is not sufficient to achieve that goal, ignoring as it does a core feature of information: it’s hard to know what the value of information is. To ensure information reaches those who value it requires something more. Consequently, to understand what information really wants, we need to divorce the goal (information to all) from the mechanism (free takings).

1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free.

2. The most notable of these is Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009). The most famous skeptical response is from Malcolm Gladwell, “Priced to Sell. Is Free the Future?” The New Yorker, July 6, 2009. Ironically, as of the writing of this book, Gladwell’s article can be accessed for free, while Anderson’s book is behind a paywall.

3. Mike Scherer documented this phenomenon for classical music in the nineteenth century. See F. M. Scherer, Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

4. The most careful study to date has been conducted by Joel Waldfogel, “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster,” working paper 16882, NBER, 2011. He finds that, whatever the negative impact piracy has had on the music industry revenues, the supply of creative works is the same as it was before digital technologies were available.

5. At the time of writing, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors was selling for $7.92 as an album on iTunes with some singles (e.g., “Gold Dust Woman”) selling for $0.99 and others (e.g., “Don’t Stop”) selling for a massive 30 percent more.

6. As I will elaborate on later, when different consumers value different songs on an album but sellers cannot tell who values what, then selling the bundle is more profitable than selling songs individually. Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits and Efficiency,” Management Science 45, no. 12 (1999): 1613–1630.

7. And consider too the consumer who purchased a legitimate DVD, only to be subjected to an ad warning against piracy every time she viewed it.

8. One could go on. According to Cory Doctorow, “If you’ve paid for a movie ‘rental’ that expires ten minutes before you finished watching it because you had to tend to the baby, you might feel you have the ethical right (if not the legal one) to torrent that movie and finish it off. Or if you’ve bought a movie once on DVD and you want to watch it while you’re on the road, you might feel justified in downloading it. Licence payers who find themselves abroad and locked out of the BBC’s iPlayer might feel like they’ve paid for the right to download the shows they’ve paid for from an unauthorised source” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow). My cable provider offers on-demand TV shows but disables functions on the remote to stop ad skipping. That is all well and good, but at the same time it disabled “pause.” It basically is begging me to use compulsory ad breaks to go to the bathroom!

9. Paul Graham, “Post-Medium Publishing,” September 2009, http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html. In fact, I wrote about a similar idea in February 2009, “Psst, No One Has Ever Sold Information,” http://economics.com.au/?p=2658.

10. Ibid.