The latest word in the whole free / online / content / Google / Murdoch debate comes from a very smart voice at The Daily Beast. As if to support his argument by undermining it, I'll copy/paste his argument here:
"Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what's happening on the free Internet is more akin to the "crowdsourcing" of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them—only the search engines that parse their articles. Why must everything we create or do be presumed free for everyone to use, in any context, and open to comments from anyone in the world? Searching me, and what I create, should be a privilege enjoyed by those to whom I offer it—not a right bestowed onto every person, company, and government on the planet.
Openness of this sort is not freedom. It’s the forced relinquishing of everything we do to the hive, and to Google. We end up with fewer new ideas, less original content, and more links, copies and regurgitations of yesterday's ideas. The people and companies who index ideas end up getting the money, while the people who actually have ideas and waste their time creating content end up broke."
See how easy that was? And I didn't have to pay a cent for it!