moving past free

"The Internet is a copy machine," explains Kevin Kelly in The Technium. And as such, Kelly suggests that it's simply not possible to try to fight the tide of facsimiles that wash over the web.

As a result, he argues, you've go to start offering things to go along with your content that can't be replicated, and thusly are "better than free." He lists eight good ideas to use as starting points and sums it up quite nicely:

Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.