Better Than Free
Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick at Wired (now that’s a cool job description) has written an intriguing essay called “Better Than Free“, where he probes the question of how thoughts, ideas and words that can be so easily copied can still have economic value:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?
He explains eight qualities and characteristics that can render something (like media industry business models …) financially sensible, turning it into something that’s “better than free”. These are “uncopyable values” like
Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, Findability
