This Jaron Lanier column in the Wall Street Journal is (ironically) priceless.  He really nails some of the important digital economy issues.

All too many of today’s Internet buzzwords— including “Web 2.0,” “Open Culture,” “Free Software” and the “Long Tail”—are terms for a new kind of collectivism that has come to dominate the way many people participate in the online world. The idea of a world where everybody has a say and nobody goes unheard is deeply appealing. But what if all of the voices that are piling on end up drowning one another out?  [...]

Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation. [...]

There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. [...]

Over the last decade, many of us cheered as a lot of software, music and news became free, but we were shooting ourselves in the collective feet.

On the one hand we want to avoid physical work and instead benefit from intellectual property. On the other hand, we’re undermining intellectual property so that information can roam around for nothing, or more precisely as bait for advertisements. That’s a formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term. [...]  Some kind of intellectual-property system is the only way Americans, or people anywhere, can earn money in the long, long term, as technology gets very good.

The US is transitioning from an industrial/manufacturing economy to an information economy.  However, if information must be “free”, then we are not likely to have much of an information economy.   Free is a legitimate option, but it cannot be the only option.

The further we go into the digital economy, the greater the need to develop a better system of property rights for intellectual property. In general, I believe this will be resolved through technology and new business models, rather than overt government mandates.  The crucial question will be whether government will step on the process of discovery before technological and commercial experimentation arrives at better solutions.