Pay Me for My Content

For all those who say "Yippee, Listen to me, I'm on Internet Radio!" Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and a columnist for Discover, has a dose of reality for you:

Pay Me for My Content - New York Times:

INTERNET idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types — like the striking screenwriters in Hollywood — who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden: stop whining and figure out how to join the party!
That’s the line I spouted when I was part of the birthing celebrations for the Web. I even wrote a manifesto titled “Piracy Is Your Friend.” But I was wrong. We were all wrong.
Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web would increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google, Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users.

Sounds familiar? Oh yeah, that's what I thought. But he is right when he says:

We owe it to ourselves and to our creative friends to acknowledge the negative results of our old idealism. We need to grow up.