The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it.

Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports — that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long).

I think the best way to examine them is not from the eye of the producer, manufacturer, or creator, but from the eye of the user. We can start with a simple user question:  why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free?

getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset.

Aspirin is free, but aspirin tailored to your DNA is very expensive. As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user.

the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it — the manual for your genes so to speak — will be expensive.

even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity.

Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up.

nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive.

Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect.

no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable.

since findability can really only happen at the systems level, creators need aggregators. This is why publishers, studios, and labels (PSL)will never disappear. They are not needed for distribution of the copies (the internet machine does that). Rather the PSL are needed for the distribution of the users’ attention back to the works.

From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the work of creators that they believe fans will connect with.

There is little doubt that besides the mega-aggregators, in the world of the free many PDLs will make money selling findability

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.

the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost the ONLY solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising.