Murdoch: Plan to charge for online news content delayed

Information WANTS to be free.

Rupert is stuck on old mindset and old business models. Not willing to adapt. Just like the music industry and online music distribution.

Unlike music, art, photographs and so on, news events are not a copyright item ... so good luck Murdoch, I suspect your market will simply find a different, and free, source for exactly the same information.

Sinudeity, if you're suggesting that music should be available online for free, let me ask you, do you do your work for free? Should any employer be entitled to take the labour of employees without paying them?

Ray,

Do you appreciate the difference between theft and piracy?

If the fruit of my labour is taken by someone else and I no longer benefit from it, that is theft, and that would clearly be wrong.

If the fruit of my labour is taken by someone else, but I continue to benefit from it and so do many thousands of others, that would be piracy, and that is not clearly wrong. It is a case of my work fulfilling its potential of benefitting many more people than the person who claims copyright on it (which is not me, the maker of the music, but the large record company whose claims to it are morally dubious).

@ Ives, I agree. I haven't paid for news in years, because it's all readily available online, and the internet is much more environmentally friendly. Websites like the Huffingtonpost have taken most respectability out of the news business anyway. No one turns to the paper for up-to date information anymore. I suppose he's hoping that the influential titles will encourage readers to pay for subscriptions, but I doubt that will work.

Ives: With regards to music, every $2mill, that an album makes from album sales, the artists only receive $14,000.

Artists make their cash from live concerts.

How about paying R500 annually, and I can download as much as I want to?

Or, artists release the music for free, and I support them by going to gigs.

Or follow the Radiohead model, and download for free, but choose how much you want to donate to the band ($1 and up).

Or the NIN model, where you download the album for free, but if you choose to purchase an album, you get a collectors edition CD/Vinyl, and a colour booklet.

And the proceeds go directly to the artists, not the corporate fat cats. Piracy in the end, equals to free marketing for the band.

As another example, District 9, is one of the most pirated movies this year. Blomkamp aint complaining. Free marketing for him, plus, the fanboys will buy the DVD (even if they pirated the movie).

If companies start charging for their online news, then the public will simply get their news from bloggers and such.

My opinion though.
Further debate on this will be awesome.

Debating copyright law in the comments to this article is probably somewhat off-topic. Regardless, I think I'll add something since this is an issue close to my heart.

Always keep in mind that morally right and wrong does not necessary align itself with legal and illegal. For example: most people would agree that Apartheid was morally wrong, but the system was upheld by laws that were legally right. Thus, any action taken in terms of those laws was legal, and yet wrong.

It is similar with copyright law. It is a man-made law (or more cynically, a corporation-made law). Infringing copyright is illegal, but that doesn't necessarily make it immoral.

What is the point of copyright anyway?

Supposedly to grant the creators of works an exclusive right to what they create in order for them to profit from it and to encourage the creation of more such works. Ultimately though, copyrighted material should return to the public domain for the greater good of society as a whole.

In practice, copyright does more to limit innovation. Content creators, if successful, can rest on their laurels and just collect royalties without doing any more work. The same goes for the big corporates that monopolise the content, and take their cut.

The artists can always do shows or sell their work in their personal capacity -- but the corporates cannot gain anything from shows. When new tech comes along, they baulk at having to innovatively adapt their business models, and instead put effort into retarding innovation in technology and art.

The corporates spew out a lot of propaganda. It's been going on for years. But artists keep creating. They must be making money somehow, despite all these supposedly massive losses to piracy.