The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [72]
THERE APPEAR TO be two broad classes of potential solutions for information industries. One is to find more effective barriers—technological and legal—to keep content behind a paid gate. Having dropped its lawsuits against individual downloaders, the RIAA has put its sights on Internet service providers—hoping they could become the enforcers of legality online—curtailing and maybe even disconnecting the service of those who download material illegally.
ISPs could even become the collectors of user fees for legal downloads or streams, like a toll at the on-ramp to the freeway. They have become the focus of a flurry of legal activity. In September of 2009 the French Parliament passed a law that would allow ISPs to disconnect clients who were caught downloading material illegally three times. A new copyright law in Sweden forces ISPs to reveal information about unauthorized file sharers to copyright holders, paving the way for legal action. In April of 2010 Britain passed a law that would not only force ISPs to slow or stop the Internet connections of those who repeatedly downloaded pirated material, but would allow the government to demand that ISPs block Web sites that hosted substantial amounts of pirated material.
This might not work. Time and again hackers have bested even the best software locks. And creating effective legal walls would require international cooperation on copyright that might prove difficult to achieve. “Copyright is becoming obsolete,” Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, told me. “Even as the law has become more and more restrictive, the practice is getting looser and looser.” Varian doesn’t think companies can protect themselves with gadgetry either: “There is no real technological solution.”
If this is so, the only thing providers of content can do is try to reconfigure the way their content is offered to consumers, to persuade them to voluntarily pay for at least some of it. Conceptualizing the CD as an ad for the concert would fit in this category, as would the new attempt by music companies to sell subscriptions to legal music streams on mobile phones. For the news media, Varian suggests “versioning”—offering a no-frills version of the news for those who want it for free and premium offerings for those willing to pay. The point “is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay,” Varian suggested. “The producer chooses the versions so as to induce the consumers to self-select into appropriate categories.”
Hopefully some of this will work. If it doesn’t, it might force information off-line altogether. The Newport Daily News in Rhode Island, which faces virtually no competition from other newspapers, tried to drive readers back to the printed page. In June of 2009 it started to charge $345 a year for an online-only subscription and $100 for a print-plus-online combo. Within three months, Web site traffic was down 30 percent and single-copy sales were up 8 percent.
WHERE INFORMATION GOES TO DIE
Ultimately, I fear free information will result in less creation of information products. In France there were 8 percent fewer albums released in the first half of 2008, and music releases by new artists fell 16 percent. More than a dozen newspaper companies in the United States have filed for bankruptcy protection since the end of 2008. This includes the Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Freedom Communications, which owns the Orange County Register and thirty-two other dailies. The Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Colorado, which had been around since 1859, published its last newspaper on February 27, 2009.
In July of 1999, 425,000 people worked for newspaper publishers in the United States. Ten years later employment in the industry had fallen by 150,000. Employment in other