Op-Ed Columnist - Paul Krugman - Bits, Bands and Books, Paying for Creativity in a Digital World (pdf)
Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.
But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.
It won’t all happen immediately. But in the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead.
