Nicolas Carr: The Price of Free.

Just in case you missed it in the November 15 issue of The New York Times Magazine, here's a fascinating article by Nicolas Carr, one of the prescient observers of the digital scene. 

A few months ago, while stalking the aisles of my local Best Buy, I gave in to techno-temptation. I bought a Blu-ray player. What I didn’t realize until I unpacked the gadget was that it does a lot more than just spin high-definition discs. It is, as they say, Web-enabled. As soon as I plugged it into an outlet in my living room, its built-in WiFi antenna sniffed out my home network and logged on. The Blu-ray player became a gateway between the Internet and my television set.

Ever since, and much to my surprise, I’ve been using the device more to transmit Internet content than to play discs. I stream TV shows and movies from Netflix, music from Pandora and videos from YouTube. Beyond my existing $11-a-month Netflix subscription, I haven’t forked out a penny for any of this programming. It comes flowing out of the Web, whenever I summon it, free.

For a long time, it has amazed me how much content is available for free, And I know that I haven't made up my mind about fair use and sharing and stealing and so forth.  But I do know that we're at the edge of an amazing new era and I'm sure we'll work out these issues as best as we can.  And creative destruction will be part of the price we'll pay.   Here's a link to the article.