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It's a mantra of the open source crowd, first stated as "information
should be free" in 1959
and being stated in its present form in 1968. It was first applied to
the Internet and the realm of personal computing at the 1984 Hackers'
Conference when Roger Clarke stated:
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive,
because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just
changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free,
because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the
time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
On the one hand, information is valuable. On the other, distributing
information keeps getting cheaper. Clarke sees this as a battle of
opposites - those who create information want to benefit from it, while
those who have received it are ready to freely share it.
This is an antithesis, not a synthesis. Thesis: Information is
costly and valuable. Antithesis: Sharing information is cheap and
nearly free.
National vs. International Copyright
In the modern world, we've been dealing with these issues for a
long, long time. Shakespeare's works are in the public domain, so
anyone can publish them. Charles Dickens, on the other hand, lived in
the era of copyright protection - except that the United
States didn't recognize British copyright, so American publishers
were free to pirate his works.
Dickens lobbied the US Congress to remedy this injustice in his 1842
and 1867/68 reading tours in the States, and Mark Twain, the American
writer, was widely
pirated in Canada to the point that Tom Sawyer was available
in a pirated Canadian edition before it went on sale in the US. It
wasn't until 1891 that US copyright law provided any protection to
foreign material.
Sir Walter Scott might not have died penniless if he had received
royalties for American editions of his novels. Charles Dickens and Mark
Twain certainly lost income due to the lack of international copyright
protection during most of the 19th century.
Their writings had been expensive, using up a great deal of their
time, but their value was diluted by piracy because publishers in other
nations were not required to respect their copyrights or pay royalties
for books by foreigners.
More Than Just Books
Copyright covers a lot more than just books. Music, recordings,
photographs, movies, television broadcasts, newspaper articles,
software, and blog entries are just some of the things that are covered
by copyright. The gist of copyright law is that the copyright holder
(usually the creator) must be allowed to control the use of his or her
material and to benefit financially from it.
Publishing something for public consumption is not the same as
putting it in the public domain, and allowing people to read an article
on your website for free is not the same as allowing them to reproduce
it elsewhere.
Case in point: In March 2007, we published 11
No Cost Tips for Optimizing Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Performance
by Ed Eubanks Jr. This article was based on his research and personal
experience, and it includes a one-paragraph editor's note. Ed Eubanks
invested his time in research and writing, and he holds copyright on
this article.*
Over time, this has become the most widely read article on Low End
Mac, and to date it has received over one million hits. (By way of
comparison, the entire website usually receives 1 to 1.5 million hits
per month.)
And over time, this article has been widely pirated. Over the past
week, I found over a dozen instances where the article was either
published verbatim, edited slightly, or translated into another
language (such as Korean) - all without permission of Ed Eubanks, the
copyright holder. (In once case, someone appended 8 more tips after
quoting our article almost completely.)
Finding the piracy was fairly easy. Entering the article's URL at
Copyscape found a lot of them.
A Google search for "using the Catalan, Farsi, or Klingon language
localizations" (a unique phrase) found several more.
As Ed's agent, I contacted the website publishers, bloggers, and
their hosts to file a DMCA takedown notice. In almost all cases, they
complied immediately. Blogger/Blogspot has been especially good about
takedowns. There was one translated version (Chinese, I think) on a
website where I have been unable to find contact information - ditto
for a Korean website that reproduced
it in English.
The problem is the theory that "information wants to be free", so
people assume they have a right to freely share it. And that impacts
our bottom line.
The Internet Model
Although you can read this column, 11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac's
Performance, and most articles on the Web for free, that doesn't mean
the content is free. Someone is paying to host the material. Someone is
paying to put ads on those pages. That may only be a fraction of a
penny per page view, but multiply that by hundreds, thousands, or tens
of thousands of hits taken from Low End Mac by pirates, it's real
money.
For most websites, income comes from a mix of paid-per-impression
ads, paid-per-month ads, and affiliate links, which only generate
income when a site visitor uses those links to make a purchase.
For the record, I did find one school system that had
pirated the article. Rather than issue a takedown notice, I gave
them an option: Either attribute the article to Ed Eubanks along with
copyright information and a link to the original article or remove it.
(I had to use Safari to send the notice. The IT department at
Framingham Public Schools has a contact form that doesn't like Camino
or Firefox. Poor form.)
Anyhow, the point is that the publishers and copyright holders need
to be allowed to profit from their work, and piracy undermines
that.
The Paywall Solution
One solution - and one we'll never use at Low End Mac - is to use a
paywall to restrict access to subscribers. A paywall forces the
potential reader to make a choice: pay for access in hopes the
information is worthwhile or look for that information elsewhere.
Newsday did that a year ago,
drawing a lot of attention to its website. Subscribers could pay
$5/month or $260/year for free access to newsday.com. Three months
later, The Observer
reported that this expensive undertaking was a fiasco. After
investing $650 million to buy Newsday and untold hours developing the
paywall, only 35 people had subscribed. If every one of those
subscribers paid for a full year, the take would be just $9,100 -
certainly not enough to justify the cost of the paywall.
One of my greatest disappointments is DigiTimes, which we link to frequently
in our weekly news roundups. Problem is, by the time we post our
roundups, most of those links have gone behind DigiTimes' paywall - and
at $370 a year, we don't expect any of our readers to pay for
access.
On the Mac side of things, MacFixIt - once one of the most widely
read and widely respected Mac websites - went the paywall route circa
2002, offending and undermining a dedicated user community that had
freely shared tips and troubleshooting advice. In the end, MacFixIt
became less important. It was eventually sold to Cnet and has become
just another part of
Cnet.
What brings this whole topic up today is an
article on Slashdot about the paywall at the New York Times. It
looks like NYT has instituted a "first click
free" policy, allowing a limited amount of access to its content
for free. Here's how NYT explains it:
"Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com
will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month;
to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access.
Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to
the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any
additional charge."
We'll see how that works for them, and we don't begrudge them going
this route. After all, organizations like NYT have a huge
infrastructure to support, far more than a website-only business with
editors, writers, designers, printers, etc.
State of the Site
This is a good opportunity to share the state of the site for Low
End Mac. I've been running the site as my full-time job since January
2001, which coincided with the beginning of the dot-com collapse. Site
income in 2002 was half as much as in 2001, but we rebounded in 2003
and saw steady growth through 2007, when the economy took a turn for
the worse.
Site income dropped about 10% in 2008, another 20% in 2009, and it
looks like 2010 may see a much smaller decline. Although the recession
is "officially" over, we're not seeing it quite yet. Maybe 2011 will
finally see things taking a turn for the better.
In terms of site traffic, it's hard to say. We were consistently
serving 1.2 to 1.3 million pages a month, but our host stopped updating
its weblog analysis software some months ago. We started using Google
Analytics in late February, but we haven't been able to update every
page on the site (15,500 pages have been updated, but there are still
some stragglers). Google Analytics is reporting lower numbers than our
site logs used to, with over 800,000 pageviews in the past month and
over 400,000 unique visitors. We are seeing consistent traffic from
month to month, just as we did in the past.
Traffic levels remain good, and Low End Mac isn't going away
regardless of the economy. I'm working a part-time third-shift job
unloading and merchandising freight at a nearby Kohl's, and although my
schedule there varies from one to five nights a week, we're getting by.
I don't have as much time to invest in LEM as I used to or would like
to, but we're getting by.
We're not going to paywall LEM, although at some point we may try to
monetize our content with an iOS app, and we're still fiddling with
Joomla as our next content management system, but we're in no hurry to
make changes.
If you appreciate our content and our value-driven philosophy, you
can help LEM by making purchases though our advertisers and through
affiliate links, and you can help out our writers by using their tip
jars.
We will continue to provide our information to readers for free,
letting advertisers cover the cost of our content through display ads
and affiliate links. Our content has value, and we are glad we can let
you access it for free.
* Low End Mac's policy is that that writer retains
copyright and that they have the right to allow others to reproduce
their material elsewhere. As the publisher, we only ask that the
article be attributed to the writer, copyright be noted, and a link to
the original article be included.
Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986,
sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and
has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.
Links for the Day
Mac of the Day: Performa 630, introduced 1994.07.01. The first desktop Mac with an IDE hard drive could accept a TV or radio tuner.
