Tag: guardian

The cost of free

Helienne Lindvall writes in the Guardian:

Cory Doctorow [will] cost you $25,000 (£15,800) to get him to speak at your conference…

But what does Doctorow speak about? Well, ironically, he’s a proponent of giving away content for free as a business model – and for years he’s been telling the music industry to adapt to it. Am I the only one to see the irony in this?

I don’t see the irony. This is exactly what Doctorow recommends. Give your content away and charge to perform it. Give your music away and charge for your gigs. I bet the content of his slides is creative commons, and I bet the recordings of this talks are creative commons even. But if watching a video of him isn’t enough for you and you want him in person, then you pay for it.

It seems that Helienne Lindvall does not understand even the basic ideas of free culture.

UPDATE: Helienne Lindvall seems to have been misinformed anyway, as per this tweet from Doctorow himself:

@helienne, I’m afraid you were badly misinformed. I don’t have a “booker”, I don’t charge anything like the sum quoted, most talks are free

UPDATE: Doctorow has since written an interesting article rebutting Lindvall.

27/9/2010 Add Comment

Guardian Warming

This article on the Guardian website is amusing. They tell the tale of Al Gore’s new Documentary about global warming, named An Inconvenient Truth.

The Guardian, as most mainstream media, make the vast majority of their income from advertising. And the majority of advertising revenue comes from the automotive industry. So, obviously, the Guardian cannot afford to discourage automotive advertising in its newspaper and on its website by taking global warming seriously.

The article reduces the film to “wooden vice-president and failed presidential candidate, wheeling his suitcases from town to town and presenting a slideshow about climate change”. It goes on to suggest that it’s only popular because it was produced by the same guy as Pulp Fiction (huh?).
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7/6/2006 3 Comments

Iran is dangerous nuclear threat

Media Lens Alert: Iran – The media fall into line

The “liberal” “left-wing” media are, once again, falling into line to support another war to enforce the status-quo (along with all the “right-wing” media too, but that’s rather a given). Iran is 10 years away from creating even one nuclear weapon (assuming that’s what it’s trying to do) yet the mainstream media are telling us they are a major threat.

This is how it always works. When the powers that be announce a new threat (Iran) the mainstream media fall over themselves to support it without question.
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9/2/2006 Add Comment