Pass the Bits, Please

Response to Shirky vs. McCloud

While reading Shirky's post Fame vs. Fortune, I agreed completely with his points. I totally bought into the idea of "mental transaction costs." An avid user of Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Audiogalaxy, and finally uTorrent, I am a champion of free content. Or at least I was. Since all the supposed "crackdown" on file sharing, I've become more weary of downloading music and have actually been giving iTunes a try. I should mention, however, that I personally have never paid for the music I've downloaded - I've gotten gift cards a couple of times for presents. When I pirate music, I usually feel both guilty (for the artist not being compensated) and somewhat apprehensive (am I going to be arrested?), but neither of these feelings is enough to stop me from doing it again. Probably the only factor that has had any influence on my reticence to download music these days is that I've gotten viruses more than once from infected downloads.

I also found Shirky's explanation of free content as an "evolutionarily stable strategy" compelling. If everyone is offering some song or movie or article for free, then great - I get it for free. If ten people offer it for free and everyone else charges, then great - I get it for free. If only one person offers it for free - same outcome. So the people who offer it for a cost don't sell it - they're at a disadvantage.

The only part of Shirky's argument I didn't agree with was his claim that, "While the author has one particular thing they want to write, the reader is usually willing to read anything interested or relevant to their interests." When I'm looking for a particular piece of content, that's the piece of content I want. If I find some other content I like in the search, that's great, but I still want the thing I started looking for in the beginning. I can see that in some cases this argument might be true: if you're looking for an article about deep vein thrombosis, and you know there's one written by a professor at Harvard, and you don't find that one, but you find one written by a professor at Yale that gives you all the information you need, then you're set. In that instance, maybe you are happy with "anything interested or relevant to [your] interests.' Most of the time, however, I don't think this is the case.

So then I read McCloud's response, Misunderstanding Micropayments, and was confronted with some arguments I didn't expect to find compelling. In several cases, I was surprised. I agreed with McCloud about not settling for content Y instead of content X just because content Y was free (as I discussed above). I also agreed that cost and ease of accessibility play a part in the equation. If I can get content I want for a small fee (under a dollar) and not have the guilt or worry that comes with file sharing, I might do "the right thing," as McCloud suggests.

Regarding BitPass specifically, I checked it out and was somewhat disappointed to find that it didn't seem to be all that McCloud claimed. After searching and reading FAQs, I was never able to get a clear idea of what specific content I would be able to purchase and thus was not enticed to try BitPass. Perhaps that is more of a marketing flaw rather than a flaw of micropayment systems in general, but the end result was the same: I didn't purchase a BitPass card. Last night, however, I did download two albums from uTorrent. I guess in some cases, actions do speak louder than words.