The New Yorker website has a very good Malcolm Gladwell article, reviewing the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson (and thanks to a Twitter buddy for pointing me to it!). Gladwell does a great job blowing holes in the popular theory that "soon, everything will be free!" by showing that many of the current examples of "freer is better" actually aren't working all that well just yet.
One trait that I've noticed among at least some of the people who try so hard (sometimes criminally so) to get things for free is that they're rarely happy about giving much away themselves. The same person who blithely steals the creative work of other people (by illegally downloading music, TV programming or whatever) will scream bloody murder if their taxes go up or an employment benefit is taken away. In other words, it's fine when shit happens to someone else, but it's suddenly a tragedy if they're the ones being shortchanged. Besides the obvious lack of empathy that this type of behaviour reveals, there's also a great deal of hypocrisy at the centre of it.
Personally, I think that some of our 'tried-and-true' money-making models are undoubtedly outdated, and will have to change. It just kind of bugs me that people are so hypocritical about it as we get there.
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What is certainly not helping Anderson (the author of the book reviewed) is that it turns out portions of the book had been copied verbatim from Wikipedia. Whoops.
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