BofA says it will repay the entire $45 billion in TARP money it received. That’s good! Except, um, it isn’t all the money that BofA got to stay afloat. Remember, the bank also was one of AIG’s counterparties that got back, at taxpayer expense, 100% of their doomed investments that they had insured through AIG.
So when is BofA going to pay that back?
If it contains the phrase “We’re not in Kansas anymore” and the film is not titled The Wizard of Oz.
Mark Cuban: Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart
I love to tweak all the internet information must be free bigots. They get so damn religious about information on the net that they lose what little objectivity and awareness of the real world they had in the first place
Wherever it’s found, bigotry deserves to be called out— say, with a link?
eweek, When Legal Strikes—Chaos Theory Meets DRM
While theres a certain infantile, self-serving view (common among the information-wants-to-be-free crowd) that just about anything one might want to do with others intellectual property is covered by fair use, the law bends pretty effectively to codify what Grant says the majority intuitively knows to be right.
Infantile and self-serving both? Juicy! Got a name?
The conventional wisdom on whether and how newspapers ought to charge for their online content is changing so rapidly, some people are having trouble keeping up. One of those people is Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who Monday repeated one of the favored fallacies of the information-must-be-free crowd: that publications that try to squeeze some cash out of readers, however delicately, risk losing their audiences.
Actually, the crowd Kurtz was talking about is people who won’t patronize pay sites; that’s not a fallacy, it’s just… what they do.
Douglas Rushkoff in the Daily Beast
Discussions between Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a structure where the former’s search engine (Bing) would pay for exclusive rights to the latter’s content (Wall Street Journal, Fox, etc.) has proven instantly upsetting to the self-appointed defenders of a “free” Internet. The simple reason: it might just work…
Of course, the information-wants-to-be-free troops are already up in arms. Some welcome what they see as the extinction of both evil empires in an ill-conceived death grip that will push Fox News and the Wall Street Journal off the mainstream map. Others see it as a last-gasp effort by “old media” to resist the unstoppable, Google-driven evolution of an entirely free content universe. They see searchability by Google as equivalent to participation in democratic society—and any resistance to offering up one’s content to exploitation by Google Inc. as resistance to the natural openness of interactive media and bottom-up civilization.
Doug: this is the web. You know…hypertext? Can’t we visit the troops ourselves?
Ken Davis, moderator of the Chicago Journalism Town Hall
Eventually even the “information wants to be free” crowd, a little greyer and sobered by mortgages and tuition bills, will come around to, and benefit from, a sane payment methodology.
Do “crowds” grow up? Seems to be what you are saying.
Some of the people in the “information wants to be free” crowd, who say News can’t do it, make some unwarranted assumptions.
First, they assume that News will only enclose the newpaper content that it currently gives away, and that they will enclose all of it.
Second, they assume that there will always be a free equivalent to anything that News puts behind the wall, meaning that people won’t have any reason to pay for it.
Third, some seem to think that just because they don’t like something, that means there’s no market for it.
Fourth, they assume that no News journalists have skills, expertise or access that might be worth paying for.
And last, there seems to be a belief in some quarters that News Corporation is largely staffed by idiots.
That’s a lot of assumptions, and they sound pretty specific, like you might have read them somewhere…?
Malcom Coles yesterday wrote a great blog post looking at ways that News International could succeed in monetising their content. I think it addresses a lot of issues and niche content that does exist, that the naysayers of the ‘information wants to be free’ crowd tend to sweep under the carpet as it doesn’t fit with their argument.
Wait: there’s a big crowd of folks who say you can’t charge for niche content? Really?
Michael Becker at Hypercrit: Set the good stuff free and charge for the peas
The title of this post doesn’t make a lot of sense until you read an interesting post by Lucas Grindley, the online managing editor for NationalJournal.com. Grindley’s responding to the revived idea of charging for news content online, an idea that’s stuck in the craw of many “information wants to be free” advocates.
Craw-stuck-upmanship can be fun to observe. May we have a link please?
Scottfox.com, Twitter Gurus Please Stop Whining!
Remember how the first generation of bloggers howled when the 2nd and 3rd generation of bloggers started including advertisements on their blogs? And, even before that, how the “information wants to be free” crowd rebelled against commercialization of the Web? And in the middle 1990’s, Internet purists even objected to the addition of images on web pages!
Well, we all know how that turned out…
Purist gurus howling and whining? Hook us up!
Amen. Let us know exactly who these people are that you’re complaining about, and what they’re saying.
Look, I know Tennessee Mountain was Not Good, but I’m skeptical that a Crocs superstore is an improvement.
No Woman No Cry by Xavier Rudd
originally by Bob Marley
(posted by bunkercomplex)
‘Bloomberg annouced today that we’ll have a new editor-in-chief at BusinessWeek. He’s 37 years old and has little background in business….’
JT’s a great editor and a good guy. And I know why, when you have a new boss coming in, you’d write something like this. Still, the lede of this post cracks me up:
Bloomberg annouced today that we’ll have a new editor-in-chief at BusinessWeek. His name is Josh Tyrangiel. He’s 37 years old and has little background in business. Those are both pluses, as far as I’m concerned.
Long time, to be sure. More fun stuff to come, for sure, but for now, may I direct your attention here, for posts of journalistic substance, and here, for random things.
Posted in…
Elsewhere, Romano explains why we don’t think of this sort of thing as selling out anymore, but, honestly, I love this song, from when New Order still sounded like Joy Division, so much I wouldn’t care even if it was.
