The thinking is, if you can afford food, the Internet, rent, BOOKS, MOVIES, etc. then you most certainly can afford to pay for a subscription or for one article.
Myself, I'm not going to pay for the Wall Street Journal but I will pay for The Economist and other news magazines/journals. So I'll be waiting till they have the story.
That's perfectly fine thinking if it's something you found yourself. However, implicit in linking something on a social link aggregator is a sort of "here, read this, it's good" on the part of the poster, which just doesn't jive with the site asking for a fee. It's like bringing donuts for your friends, opening the box and telling them you got each person their favorite, and then charging for them—it's just not how our particular social machinery works.
I think it's more like you tell your friends about a place that sells great donuts, then they go to the donut shop and yell at the proprietor because his donuts aren't free.
Not necessarily. Most of the links posted here are free. Most of the people here will expect the links to be to freely distributed content. Submitting a story here without saying "[pay to see]" or something similar at the end is akin to claiming that the content is free.
To further extend the analogy, it would be like announcing the donut shop in a forum where people are talking about free food. Then being baffled when people took that to mean tha the donuts would be free.
Unlike donuts, information wants to be free. I'm not saying that trying to be funny. It is in the nature of information to be free. One can try to shackle information, but one will have problems doing so, this is to be expected.
When explaining one's rationale for locking down information, people often use metaphors of physical objects. This is doomed to fail. Try to use non-physical objects that are similar in nature to information as metaphors instead. The problem with that is of course that it is also impossible, as the very nature information shares with intangible goods is that they also want to be free.
Ah, you are selling bullshit my friend. If your employer turned round to you after a month of work and said, 'but tjogin, all you've done is create information and information wants to be free, why should I pay you?', methinks your view on the entire matter would rapidly change.
Someone worked hard to produce that article and if they want to charge for it it's their right to.
I never even mentioned economics, thus your comment does not in any way disprove anything I said.
In your example, the employer buys time, not information. Time is significantly harder to reproduce or copy than information is.
So, one way to charge for information is to sell time sensitive information (like stock information), but then what you're really selling is time exclusivity.
Selling information without any kind of unique or time sensitive properties is doomed to fail — the only thing that made it once possible was technical limitations; information needed for instance paper as a vehicle to distribute it. Those technical limitations are gone now.
He should pay tjogin because of the contract he and tjogin have, or, absent such a contract, because he wants more content from tjogin or people tjogin could communicate with.
Myself, I'm not going to pay for the Wall Street Journal but I will pay for The Economist and other news magazines/journals. So I'll be waiting till they have the story.