I've thought some about it, and I still find it hard to believe that the publishing industry is pinning their hopes on a fraction of a fraction of a market. How many people are going to buy or can buy an ipad? Now, how many of them are going to purchase an app, that only shows news stories?
And these publishing houses are willing to kill off their online market for that?

The legal distinction is between theft (depriving another of his property) and misappropriation (wrongful use of another's property without her consent). Copyright violation is misappropriation: the owner is left with the original.

Some dude named Tom Jefferson wrote a little essay a while back:
http://www.movingtofreedom.org/2006/10/06/thomas-jefferson-on-patents-and-freedom-of-ideas/

As to Bob Garfield's: "every piece of for-sale content you take without paying for costs the owner a sale", um. no, and that's a topic covered, um, recently, by some dude named Bob:
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/04/23/04

My own take has been posted online for about a decade. Legitimate and illegitimate copying are two competing supply curves for competing products, with the net effect of unauthorized copies being reduced prices, though this may result in either larger or smaller markets for a work depending on other factors. In the 1990s there was a meme that you had to give away 1,000,000 copies of a mass-market program for free to generate market traction.
http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Rants/piracy.html

Regards online media: I see an evolving situation. Print is contracting, online has its monetization issues. Advertising works phenomenally...if your name is Google. Micropayments work phenomenally...if your name is Apple (iTunes). Busking, performance, marketing, etc., are all angles being played. Subscriptions work for some. NPR and Craigslist both show that a very slippery wheel (revenue from a portion of the user base) can give adequate traction.

I see a model ultimately based on syndication, particularly as broadband vendors consolidate. Your content bill will be a bite taken from your access bill, distributed similarly to ASCAP radio royalties based on estimates of usage. Micropayments are too fussy, in general, subscriptions too limiting, advertising not sufficiently remunerative, ultimately.

Not perfect, but a working kluge.

I believe and hope that the mall-like app era of Apple will be brief. Right now, Apple can get away with restrictive policies that hurt consumers as well as developers because their products are slicker than those of the competition. Other platforms are catching up, though. Android, in particular, is almost there. When other platforms become viable, Apple will have to become more open lest developers and consumers defect in droves.

As Bob Garfield (8) mentioned above, there is a distinction between property rights and what is in the best self interest of the rights holder. Marcel (12) has pointed out why it may well be in the best interests of the rights holder to tolerate the theft of their content, or even to encourage it.

At the same time, BlackBelt's comment (7) is entirely different. Your point seems to be that you wouldn't buy the content so it's ok to steal it because there wasn't a "lost sale." If we translate that into tangible goods, is it ok for me to steal a Maserati because I know I certainly wouldn't ever buy one? I don't live in a black and white world but this concept seems to break down pretty quickly.

The bottom line is that someone owning a property has the right to determine if and how it is used. Most smart property owners will seek to maximize the value of their property but it is also their right not to do so.

For those of us in digital information publishing (music, movies, words, games, or whatever), who have long had to confront arguments like that of BlackBelt Jones, the move back to more controlled environments like the iPad will have an allure. It's an open question how this will play out. If the no-cost content on an ad-supported website approach was widely successful, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Now we'll get to see if there's something better, and if so whether it will gain critical mass from both uses and publishers.

Yet again, there is an assumption that everyone can afford the iPhone, iPad, iJunk and its related iApps. I can't afford any of this stuff, nor can most the people I know who have to choose between paying bills and playing with some electronic toy. Yeah, lots of people will follow Jobs off an economic cliff to be the first on the block with the newest variation on an old theme of buy-buy-buy in a conspicuous consumption world, but what I see is the continued push to widen the divide between the haves and the have nots. Well, electronic leashes may be the fad, but I just have to run wild for awhile longer. I need to eat, and there is no app for paying my food bills. What is sad, to me, is "On the Media" assumes everyone has one of these gadgets and never addresses the side of those who simply can't afford it. Am I really the only one?

@Bob Garfield,
Yes sick and tired, because you can't prove that lost sale. And there is no such thing as a lost sale on a financial ledger.

I downloaded a movie the other night, mostly because it was a made-for-tv movie that will never appear on Dutch television. (If you must know it's Terry Pratchett's Going Postal that I downloaded, one of my favourite books).

At the end of the second part they announced they would be selling the dvds of the movie later that year. I went online to UK SkyOne's website, and found out that they had also filmed the books Colour of Magic/Light Fantastic of the same author. So I bought those and preordered the movie Going Postal.

So from 1 download they got 2 purchases.
Where was the lost sale?
If I had not downloaded the movie I would not have known about the dvds being for sale. They'd have lost both my sales.
How about them apples?

I'm not saying that copyright infringement is illegal, but equating a download as a lost sale is highly disingenuous.

Thank you for any excellent and thought-provoking news segement. I didn't totally agree with it, but it's easy to follow the arguments of those who believe that quality content will become more expensive in the future.

On another note, I am an MBA student in a very challenging Marketing class, so I found this segment very useful and interesting, and I mentioned it in my online class forum.

Thank you for a timely and helpful article.

Sincerely,

William Favre Slater, III
http://billslater.com
Chicago

Free? An iPad costs like $600 plus internet fees. Now you want to charge for the content?

Judith Miller's informative Iraq coverage was worth what exactly?

Look at stock market information. Real time information like what Bloomberg sells is very expensive, Stale information like the stock quotes on the net are free. BTW, scam stock market tip sheets cost the same as before the internet.

But it is, because shoplifting creates measurable harm because it depletes an actual inventory. I'm not disputing that intellectual property is property, but we were talking about adding up the damage.

"Every piece of for-sale content you take without paying for costs the owner a sale." is not a literal statement of truth, and because there is no loss of actual property, there must be a lost sale in order for the theft to harm the creator.

Saying that taking intellectual property is more defensible than shoplifting isn't the same thing as saying that it's defensible, but explaining the moral parameters with obvious untruths is not going to change anybody's behavior, and I'm assuming that, like adding up the amount of spilled oil, calculating the damage theft causes as accurately ass possible has some value.

@blackbelt

we are not discussing what, in a digital world, is BEST for the rights holder. obviously, as chris anderson made amply clear in "free," the owner's best option often is to give stuff away (or let it be stolen) and to monetize elsewhere. that's just facing reality.

but that doesn't change the fact that intellectual property is still property, and the law says you may not steal what does not belong to you. "If i didn't steal it, I wouldn't have bought it" may or may not be true, but it is no more an excuse for movie piracy than it is for shoplifting.

Well, now, Bob, that's not exactly correct, either.

"Every piece of for-sale content you take without paying for costs the owner a sale" assumes that if I had to pay, I would, but it's probably at least as likely that I would not.

Personally, i want to be ethical and responsible, and when content is worth the full price to me, considering my limited resources, I'll pay. But in my opinion, if I know full well that the vendor isn't going to see my money either way, I think the content creator's best interest is served by stealing. If it means no more or less money to me either way. I'd rather have someone who can't afford my stuff reading it than not reading it.

I'm not saying that this is workable as a system of commerce, (though it may be the closest thing to what we actually have to work with) I'm just saying the morality is murky, and "Every piece of for-sale content you take without paying for costs the owner a sale" is flawed math.

@marcel

oh, so you're sick and tired, are you? you are also plainly wrong -- and, by the way, unilaterally overturning centuries of intellectual property law. including patent law.

every piece of for-sale content you take without paying for costs the owner a sale. his ownership is no artificial construct: he has created it as the expense of labor and money. you are on your honor not to take it, no matter how easy it is to do so.

society grants these ownership rights for a finite period, but while they are legally protected, if you expropriate the content, you are a thief. period.

@Marcel de Jong What? No linking? Every user of Facebook and Twitter will immediately seek another news source.

Michael Hirschorn, who thinks Steve Jobs is "a genius and a God among us" is a little too influenced by the view within Apple's walled garden. I know 1 person who owns an iphone. Steve Jobs is all-powerful GOD in his little universe of wide-eyed devotees, but when he tries to influence the rest of us, like when he gets us all to switch from Flash to HTML5, he starts to look like a belligerent little tyrant. A "Battle Royale" between Apple and Google isn't even going to make it to my PC.

Oh and another thing, I'm sick and tired of hearing people talking about "stealing content" and "illegal content". First of all, if I copy an article off of a news website, it's not stolen, they still have their article right there. And content in and of itself can't be illegal. And I had expected Bob to speak up about it. It's not theft unless something has been taken away and the original owner has no access to it anymore.

If newspapers were to lock stuff up behind paywalls or inside apps, they are doing a few things that will hurt them:
1) They are removing themselves from the conversation. With apps you can't link to content, so you can't blog/twitter/talk about it on facebook. The internet is not so much a broadcast medium as it is a communication medium.
So, by not being able to talk about it, they are losing a huge chunk of the internet market.

2) They are also opening up a market for a player that sees revenue opportunities in the form of ad-dollars.

3) Not everyone is going to get an Ipad or any type of pad, so the newspapers are willing to ostracize that part of the market? That's just moronic!

Look at the market in The Netherlands (a small country): we have newspapers that cost money, but we also have 3 (yes, 3) daily newspapers that are offered for free nationwide.
We have a few news websites that are not directly associated with paper newspapers, offering their content for free (with ads), and they can afford their own journalistic staff and editors.

How can this be, when the newspaper industry is dying?!(/sarcasm)

Besides all this. We (and that's a global we) have never paid for content with regards to news. We have always paid for the medium.

Paywalls can work for newspapers for specific news stories. Have a general story for free, but offer only summaries of journalistic pieces, and sell the full journalistic piece for for instance 1 dollar per piece of 5 bucks a month.
In the words of Moist von Lipwig (one of Terry Pratchett's discworld characters) "Make it easy for people to give you money."

But, I'm looking forward to the death of these dinosaurs. It will open up the market for smarter people who do see ways of making money in free content.

If information or anything wants to be expensive, just sell it to the government. How much does the CIA and NSA spend each year on information gathering with questionable results?