I do fundamentally agree with you, I just don’t see any feasible way to enforce this. If our work is any good, it will get pirated. Fighting that is wasted effort, take it as the compliment it is.

It’s also a great ecosystem driver! It reminds us to focus on creating really useful, concise material. It’s way too easy to “pad the product” with devices and re-statements. A good example is how David Allen’s productivity bible, Get Things Done, can easily melt down to a seven page Wiki summary.

And I think the Locke analogy/argument is still intact. Take your own example: “it’s perspective, it’s art, it’s presentation and pitch” – those are all the result of someone “putting work into it.”

Wendy – I agree that we need to talk about the “cost” of good reporting, but unfortunately it’s less straightforward than just sitting the unruly public down and telling them how much it costs. Just understanding the cost doesn’t mean that readers (users) will want to pay for it.

There are market realities that can’t be ignored. It’s not just explaining the cost, it’s also making people want to buy it.

Allan – Yep!

Locke wasn’t far off at all. You’re talking about intellectual property the same way that Locke spoke of tangible property.

“But what does cost money is the work put into preparing the information.”

Now this is finally getting a bit beyond the subject of the last couple weeks and toward a greater understanding of what goes into the news and information that’s theoretically urging to be free.

As a longtime reporter trying to forge together a post-newsroom writing/blogging career, this is where this conversation needs to keep going. And not just for my sake.

In order to determine how much we might want to pay for content, or even how to evaluate quality content that we might want to pay for at all, it’s important to understand what it costs to do journalism. And what journalists must do to commit acts of quality journalism.

To the first comment here I would add that journalistic writing, above all, is about reporting. Lots of good reporting. It ain’t easy and it don’t come cheap.

Also, things have changed since Locke, and the example you quote barely exists anymore. There is no homesteading movement anymore, no heroic frontier man hewing handmade property out of raw nature. We live in a built, bought and sold environment and we work on huge urban plantations.

There’s a market for good writing, always. Writing isn’t just information, though: it’s perspective, it’s art, it’s presentation and pitch. I think that’s the real dividing line — anyone should be able to access Census and USGS data, as well as corporate reports and the CRS documents that recently got “leaked.”

But people will still gladly pay $10 for a Kurt Vonnegut book, even if they’ve read it before.