Media Ecology

Take what you want….it’s free…

There is a certain irony in Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column yesterday.

Friedman was writing about Costa Rica’s new Minister for the Environment, who is also responsible for energy, mining and so on.

It’s the combination of environment and natural resource exploitation that Friedman finds so interesting:

More than any nation I’ve ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

The irony is that while Friedman extols “payment for environmental services” (nobody gets to treat water or forests as free anymore), his own work is very much treated as free. It appears online for no payment.

For most of human history, the idea of scavenging the land for whatever you would find and simply taking it was common practice.  Gold, oil, copper, or nuts and berries.

They were there, someone or something had put them there for you to take, so take them.

Up until now, we have applied this same concept of hunting and gathering to the Internet.  Go on a hunting trip across the verdant fields of the web and see what you can find. Once you do, take it. It’s yours.

Don’t worry about having to pay for it.  There’s lots more where that came from.

Well, if a kind of environmental maturity is finally beginning to dawn on us for the world of natural resources – ie, you actually have to pay a price for taking water or trees or copper, then perhaps, as we move into the depths of the ‘information age’ we might also come to the conclusion that you have to pay a price, albeit perhaps small on a person by person basis, for intellectual content that you harvest as well.

Content is not free.

Writers who create content or reporters who report or musicians who upload music are entitled to be paid for their work.

The web, when we first discovered it (so to speak) was virgin land.

Today, it’s a crowded landscape, and seemingly we are still only at the very beginning.

But like the English Enclosure Laws, freewheeling commons ultimately give way to corporate enterprises and the notion of compensation, and that is no bad thing.

If we can see our way to paying a price for the water or trees that we use in Costa Rica (or indeed the nuts and berries), then as we become an economy driven by intellectual content, surely we can see that hunting and gathering ideas and work on the forest floor and keeping what we find also has a limited value.

Perhaps it is time for the web to evolve a ‘holistic strategy’ that serves the creators of content as well as the hunters and gatherers.