David Weinberger (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame) talks about these goods you get value from, yet won’t pay for, and coins the term “freechasing” to explain this interesting phenomena the manichean copyright laws of this world ignore:

A while ago a teacher told me that she didn’t use a chapter of my book […] because she didn’t want to ask her students to buy the entire volume. She should have instead […] printed up some copyright-bustin’ copies. Since she wasn’t going to buy the book, she wouldn’t have been depriving me or my publisher of any money […] and it’d be in my long term interest to have students introduced to my writing.

Link

The reasoning- limited to goods that are not diminished by being consumed – is very disturbing.

What damage am I doing if I use things I will or can NOT buy anyway? Should books be free downloads for those who can’t afford them? Maybe that would allow them to self educate and get a better situation. And then start buying books?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 4:41 pm and is filed under english. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.