How can you sell something that is already Free?
Kevin Kelly has an blog post titled: Better Than Free
In it he talks about the impact of the Internet's ability to easily replicate digital information in such a way that makes it inherently free. We can see this being experienced by the music industry. Digitized music is easy to copy and redistribute over the internet. Kelly goes so far as to call the internet a "a copy machine.
At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can't erase something once its flowed on the internet.
But the rules are changing, as once precious copies are now becoming essentially free to anyone who decides to go and look for them.
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
It may be time to let go of charging for our digital goods, and focusing on charging for that which cannot be copied. Kelly calls these the 8 Generatives:
- Immediacy
- Personalization
- Interpretation
- Authenticity
- Accessibility
- Embodiment
- Patronage
- Findability
To find out more, read the full article Better Than Free.
But before you go, you might ask why am I posting about this? Well, I have been working on the Innovation Agent Handbook that I plan to distribute via the Internet over the coming months. Reading Kelly's article, I realised that I always knew that you cannot really protect copyright of digital goods on the internet. It's as if you have to accept a number of 'spoils' or 'pirated' copies. Having read Kelly's article though, I am now interested in applying creative problem solving to explore how can this ability to freely copy be turned into a benefit rather than a limitation? I am always fascinated how seeming negatives can be turned into positives.
Hopefully you'll see the fruits of my labour when I release the Innovation Agent Handbook later this year.
Kevin Kelly has an blog post titled: Better Than Free
In it he talks about the impact of the Internet's ability to easily replicate digital information in such a way that makes it inherently free. We can see this being experienced by the music industry. Digitized music is easy to copy and redistribute over the internet. Kelly goes so far as to call the internet a "a copy machine.
At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can't erase something once its flowed on the internet.
But the rules are changing, as once precious copies are now becoming essentially free to anyone who decides to go and look for them.
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
It may be time to let go of charging for our digital goods, and focusing on charging for that which cannot be copied. Kelly calls these the 8 Generatives:
- Immediacy
- Personalization
- Interpretation
- Authenticity
- Accessibility
- Embodiment
- Patronage
- Findability
To find out more, read the full article Better Than Free.
But before you go, you might ask why am I posting about this? Well, I have been working on the Innovation Agent Handbook that I plan to distribute via the Internet over the coming months. Reading Kelly's article, I realised that I always knew that you cannot really protect copyright of digital goods on the internet. It's as if you have to accept a number of 'spoils' or 'pirated' copies. Having read Kelly's article though, I am now interested in applying creative problem solving to explore how can this ability to freely copy be turned into a benefit rather than a limitation? I am always fascinated how seeming negatives can be turned into positives.
Hopefully you'll see the fruits of my labour when I release the Innovation Agent Handbook later this year.
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