No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

I know its such a cliche idiom but its so true, well at least its getting true-er if there is such a thing.

So like what's the deal?

It's as if the trend these days is to milk things. We all know very well about how the music industry and Hollywood has been battling pirates like tulanwarriors. As long as you use something that is theirs without their permission to make money, you're screwed. You know you have filesharing and stuff like that.

The latest move by multi-million/billion dollar corporations, now from the news and information sector, is to license their news articles meaning that probably in the next few years when i type "Arsenal" in my Google search box, chances are that I will need to pay to access news articles from the News tab.

The mentioned corporations are well known News corp. and AP (The Associated Press) who are the biggest players in the news publishing industry. They felt that the reductions in their earnings this year was due to them selling their news pieces at cheaper prices because their buyers (newspapers and broadcasters) are losing advertising revenue due to people turning to cheaper and more effective alternatives on the internet. So they thought the best way to counter that is to go to the root of the problem and charging the Internet search engines.

The picture I am getting now after reading the article is that the ability to obtain information freely from the web is going to be diminished, note diminished not lost because that is how things are beginning to work on the Internet, with sites such as Wikipedia articles are actually written by normal users and thats how many software projects are being done, open source. But then they form only a slice of what information we can easily access from the internet now. If these dudes were to license their materials, probably many of us will return to the good ol' days of visiting libraries for resources because there exists this new hurdle of accessing these information.

I don't know, I'm probably being paranoid and Ming will have probably ignored everything I said and just nods away at that last statement. But it's definitely food for thought. I just don't really like the idea because it sounds so much like how corporations are putting licenses on everything they own to "protect" their property. Anyway if you're interested you can read the article yourself here.