When “free” isn’t

About 2 p.m. I got an e-mail from a friend with the subject “Holy crap!!!!” and immediately had to open it. He recounted he was downloading the new U2 album No Line On The Horizon now after it had been leaked online and wanted to pass on the information that I could get the album a full two weeks before its actual release.

A little background first. I’m a U2 nut, and not so closeted. I saw them play three times in three different cities on their last tour, and that was a down year for me. So a chance to hear fresh music from my favorite band is always enticing.

Ultimately, I declined, and it wasn’t that difficult despite the potential payoff. Just two weeks ago, I mused, I had lectured in Principles of American Journalism that a big challenge facing the journalist of tomorrow is monetizing news in an era where people expect it to be free.

I have a standard exercise I do in most of my courses. I first ask the journalism students whether they think people should be forced to pay for news. Without fail, most hands go up, and rightfully so. They are entering a profession and they need to make a living. While they keep their hands up, I ask them to put their hand down if they have downloaded music without paying from it from a file-swapping or bit torrent site.

Almost everyone puts their hand down.

I use this exercise to point out the holes in their thinking (or lack thereof). They are a generation that has grown up with the expectation that information of all types, – be it music, movies, or news – should be free. And to be honest I sympathize partly with that sentiment, because I do believe information is best when it is free. But the point I make is that illegal file sharing (and while there is debate about the philosophical relationship between information and freedom, there is none about its legality) has helped to create this culture on the Web that expects freedom, not pay-for-play. It’s a giant reason (other than obvious legal conflicts) why I don’t download music or any other types of media for free; I can’t stop the wave, but I don’t want to add to the problem either.

Don’t get me wrong. Music and movies long have been overpriced, and both the RIAA and MPAA made a huge mistake by trying to save their business model via copyright claims when they should’ve found a way to make paying for download easy and palatable. They lost years of lead time in perfecting the technology, and they are suffering now for it.

On the other hand, a student in a class of mine once claimed in response in a class that illegal downloading for them was an act of civil disobedience against a system that overprices a product (information) that ought to be free. I believe my sarcastic response was, “Yeah, you are a real Rosa Parks there, buddy.”

Now, one could argue that I am going to buy the new U2 album anyway due to my nut-ness and thus the download isn’t wrong. While I see the argument there, my belief is that the first illegal download, even halfway justified, makes it easier to keep doing it. But my larger point here is that we’ve created a culture of file swapping where information is now expected to be free. We may have started with an innocent download of an album people were going to buy anyway, but we sure aren’t there anymore.

The ultimate puzzle is I know where this is going. We can’t really undo the damage of years of misplaced expectations about paying for media, but consumers often don’t realize the enormous costs associated with creating media content they love either.

I always advise my journalism students and colleagues that if they eventually want people to pay for content then it starts with them. It has always seemed hypocritical to me that we journalists want to scream copyright and charge for content of one sort but see no issue with illegal use of content of another sort. And we haven’t even touched on the morality or ethical nature of illegal downloading; I’ll stick to practical here.

So even if I am excited about the new album, U2 will have to wait until the album is officially released. I hope that, in some loosely connected way, I’m actually helping save journalism.