Fuzzy Math URL: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000616
Date: 2002-09-25T18:54:10-06:00

One of the weirdest things I heard when listening to the Cato Institute debate 
was an economist claim "a tenet of my profession is that people won't pay for 
something they can get for free." Someone objected, using the analogy of 
bottled water. There's a far better example: The New York Times.  

Incredibly, this institution puts out pages and pages of high-quality 
professional content each week and then distributes them by means of men in 
trucks across the country overnight where they sit, waiting to be sold to 
people. Meanwhile, the exact same content is available _for free_ using an 
insidious peer-to-peer downloading system called "the Web" by typing in the 
keyword "www.nytimes.com". Those people at the New York Times must not 
understand the Internet or something! 

More examples: the thriving shareware market, the Baen Free Library, Janis Ian 
and others. 

Other times, people claim that no one will create if they can't get paid. I'd 
like to introduce you to free software and just about every weblog on the 
planet.