4 ms·

Obviously, copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP for this model to work. But that is as separate issue which is not mitigated

Obviously, copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP for this model to work. But that is as separate issue which is not mitigated by the ad-supported model. E.g. there are whole sites devoted to blatantly ripping off content from NY Times, WSJ, etc. and slapping their own ads on top.

cwyers 11y ago
It's not about being able to control the distribution of their IP, it's that allowing users to redistribute their IP makes that IP more valuable for users. This isn't a universal truth of all content, but it's certainly a truth for stuff like news articles. Look at this very website. It's premised around sharing articles, blog posts, and such and allowing users to add their own commentary and see what others think about the same article. Every time a paywalled article comes up on the front page Hacker News, half the posts in the first 10 minutes are about how to get around the paywall or complaints about the paywall. The point is, for a user of Hacker News, an article he or she can post on this site and share with other HN users is simply more valuable than an article he or she cannot. And that's not just a local phenomenon, it's part of Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other smaller (sometimes ad hoc) online communities.
- amelius 11y ago
  But isn't it great that HN lets us know which articles are worth paying for?
tolmasky 11y ago
Its a deeply interrelated issue. Personally, "copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP" is far more frightening to hear to me than anything about ads. Every "advancement" made for IP holders is usually incredibly customer hostile. We've seen international trade deals over this issue, we've seen fundamental rights degraded over this issue. I personally would prefer it not boil down to legal means of ensuring content owners get their content not ripped off (a last resort that rarely works), as opposed to a natural solution where the distribution method matches the natural inclinations of the users (people generally DON'T feel bad about stealing "content", but DO feel bad about stealing washing machines). For the record, ads existed before the internet too. Remember the radio? Remember PHYSICAL newspapers. Remember TV? Its kind of nice that the lower economic stratus of society has SOME access to all these services without being blocked by a paywall. In a paywall world, you walk into a library to use the internet because you don't have a computer, then are turned away from every site because you also don't have a credit card.
- pmontra 11y ago
  Ok with your first paragraph and free TV with ads predates the Internet, ok. But free newspapers with ads are a 2000's invention, at least in my part of the world. Newspapers used to be protected by a paywall, currently some hundreds of Euro per year. Problem is: people usually read only one physical newspaper so even one Euro per day would be ok, but they read articles on random websites linked by Google News. Either you micro-pay each article (0.01?) or you won't afford news anymore, unless you read them on only one website again. Maybe that kind of world would be great for aggregators. Think Flipboard. They could buy content from newspapers and resell it with a subscription. That would work for Blogger and Wordpress.com too: pay for access to all the blogs on the site. Maybe this is the first step of an Apple's strategy to become a news/blog aggregator. Damage the competition and take over.

cwyers 11y ago

It's not about being able to control the distribution of their IP, it's that allowing users to redistribute their IP makes that IP more valuable for users. This isn't a universal truth of all content, but it's certainly a truth for stuff like news articles. Look at this very website. It's premised around sharing articles, blog posts, and such and allowing users to add their own commentary and see what others think about the same article. Every time a paywalled article comes up on the front page Hacker News, half the posts in the first 10 minutes are about how to get around the paywall or complaints about the paywall. The point is, for a user of Hacker News, an article he or she can post on this site and share with other HN users is simply more valuable than an article he or she cannot. And that's not just a local phenomenon, it's part of Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other smaller (sometimes ad hoc) online communities.

amelius 11y ago
But isn't it great that HN lets us know which articles are worth paying for?

tolmasky 11y ago

Its a deeply interrelated issue. Personally, "copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP" is far more frightening to hear to me than anything about ads. Every "advancement" made for IP holders is usually incredibly customer hostile. We've seen international trade deals over this issue, we've seen fundamental rights degraded over this issue. I personally would prefer it not boil down to legal means of ensuring content owners get their content not ripped off (a last resort that rarely works), as opposed to a natural solution where the distribution method matches the natural inclinations of the users (people generally DON'T feel bad about stealing "content", but DO feel bad about stealing washing machines). For the record, ads existed before the internet too. Remember the radio? Remember PHYSICAL newspapers. Remember TV? Its kind of nice that the lower economic stratus of society has SOME access to all these services without being blocked by a paywall. In a paywall world, you walk into a library to use the internet because you don't have a computer, then are turned away from every site because you also don't have a credit card.

pmontra 11y ago
Ok with your first paragraph and free TV with ads predates the Internet, ok. But free newspapers with ads are a 2000's invention, at least in my part of the world. Newspapers used to be protected by a paywall, currently some hundreds of Euro per year. Problem is: people usually read only one physical newspaper so even one Euro per day would be ok, but they read articles on random websites linked by Google News. Either you micro-pay each article (0.01?) or you won't afford news anymore, unless you read them on only one website again. Maybe that kind of world would be great for aggregators. Think Flipboard. They could buy content from newspapers and resell it with a subscription. That would work for Blogger and Wordpress.com too: pay for access to all the blogs on the site. Maybe this is the first step of an Apple's strategy to become a news/blog aggregator. Damage the competition and take over.