When Did "Free" Become a Four Letter Word?

A popular tune reminds us that "The best things in life are free." It lists among other benefits the moon, the stars, the flowers in spring and the robins that sing. Omitted from the lyrics is information, because there are a lot of people who don't think free information is one of the best things in life. In fact "Free" has become one of the nastier four-letter words in the English language, or at least one of the most controversial.

Two authors, Chris Anderson and Corey Doctorow, have invested a good deal of their time (and ours) attempting to redefine free, not merely as an abstract concept but as a template for action. I'll state my view upfront: I agree with economist Milton Friedman who said "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Free always has a price, and anyone who believes otherwise will end up either paying it or sticking someone else with the bill. I will even go so far as to say this is an immutable law.

But read on and judge for yourself.

As digital media mature and the financial stakes in the e-book industry soar on a double-digit trajectory, a task force of businesspeople, entrepreneurs and managers, backed by righteously indignant writers, musicians and artists is confronting a generation of Web users that stubbornly refuses to pay for content.

Some members of this generation grew up with a strong sense of entitlement; some simply have little or no comprehension of copyright; still others, taking Robin Hood as their role model, deliberately and defiantly hack protected files or download pirated content to get around the law, asserting their right to liberate it from capitalist exploiters. And still others are, simply, thieves. They all march under the banner "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE" or sport the "Copyleft" symbol displayed here (I'm not sure if Copyleft is copyrighted). Media news reports daily clashes with content providers tired of seeing the fruits of their creativity dissipated, given away or stolen.

The slogan, the movement and the tension between free and commercial date back to the dawn of the modern computer era, indeed to the dawn of copyright protection itself when the conflict between content creators and legitimate users (like scholars) was resolved in a complex body of law that governs intellectual property rights to this day.

Standing between these clashing armies is a contingent of men and women dedicated to understanding the relationship between content given away and content sold. Their observations - some scientific, some anecdotal - have begun to yield some thought-provoking hypotheses that might shape e-business strategies in the next generation. Few of them have as much to say as Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and bestselling author of The Long Tail. Anderson's book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, has just been published, and an interview with him conducted by Publishers Weekly's Andrew Richard Albanese reveals just how complex the word - and the concept - is. Free, Anderson states, is "a word with economic, psychological, historical meaning, a word with incredible misunderstanding and paradoxical diversions in definition."

The first thing that strikes you about the book's title is its subtitle. Free is a price? That's hard enough to absorb, but free as a radical price is a real head-scratcher.

Anderson says the definition of free as the opposite of paid is an artificial one. If it were not, how do we explain that people are making money giving products and services away? The answer is to view free as adding value to products that are offered for sale. We've often referred to the Gillette Razor model of giving away the razor but selling the blades. That concept can be applied to just about any product or service, and indeed that's just what is happening. Anderson employs a word we've heard a lot of lately, "freemium," meaning "using free to market paid." The biggest misunderstanding of my work," he tells Publishers Weekly, "is that I believe everything should be free. Not the case! Free should be a price point in the marketplace, but the free stuff should market the paid stuff. "

You would think so. But as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his review of the book in The New Yorker, "...in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.

"Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other."

In other words, free is simply the glamorous side of capitalism that we prefer to see. But it's really an illusion. In capitalism as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you're getting something free, someone else is paying for it.

Another name heard most frequently in connection with free is Corey Doctorow, the Canadian science fiction author, blogger and (depending on which side of the controversy you're on) either a hero or a subversive. His articulate efforts to shake up the traditional publishing establishment have placed him on the leading edge of the digital paradigm shift. By putting his money where his mouth is he has singlehandedly altered our thinking about what works and what no longer works in the book industry.

Doctorow's latest experimental venture exemplifies his philosophy. According to Locus, the trade publication of the fantasy and science fiction world, Doctorow's latest short story collection, A Little Help, will be self-published in at least four different editions: "A free Creative Commons-licensed online edition in various formats; a free audio-book 'featuring high-quality readings by a variety of voice-actor friends'; a print-on-demand trade paperback with five variant covers; and a limited edition hardcover to be sold in the $100-$250 range'...in batches of 10. The hardcover will feature bound-in SD cards or USB sticks including the e-book and audiobooks, and unique-to-each-volume endpapers made of signed and annotated paper ephemera by Doctorow's writer friends," Locus reports.

He will also produce a "super-premium" edition of one copy, including a story written specifically for the purchaser, for $10,000 (don't bother, it's already sold!). He will offer custom editions for conferences and other events with cover art of the organization's choice, for a premium price. He will donate 10% of income from the book to Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the licensed sharing of creative works.

"There're plenty of reasons to do this," says Doctorow, "but for me, the most interesting one is the ability to empirically test some of the oft- bandied hypotheses about 21st century publication, the spectrum that runs from 'Self-publication is a narcissistic money-pit that absorbs your time and money without returning as much as a real publishing deal could' to 'Publishers are obsolete dinosaurs and writers can do just as well going it alone.'"

Though some of this sounds positively Marxo-communo-anarcho-iconoclasto (Wikipedia says his parents were Trotskyist activists and he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and Greenpeace as a child), we cannot overlook the good old capitalistic enterprise underlying his experiment. By interweaving free and paid - freemium - Corey Doctorow is the poster child for Chris Anderson's theories.

Richard Curtis