Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller “The Long Tail,” and “Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend.
Had James Moroney read Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion $26.99), Amazon’s offer might not have seemed quite so surprising. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device-not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted.
On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified.
The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay,” Chris Anderson writes, “but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” Illustration by Richard McguireĪt a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon.
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