“In this new world of the Net it is easy to copy information but hard to find it” umm what? I am extremely confused by the beginning of this article. I think honestly I missed the meaning of what the author was trying to say because I always thought that it was easy to find information on the internet … in fact that’s what I thought one of the main purposes of the internet was?
“Chief among the new rules is that “content is free.” While not all content will be free, the new economic dynamic will operate as if it were” This is one of the best all around internet describing sentences out there. Let’s take for example Itunes. How many of you have realistically paid for a song/ album or app, ever? Cause honestly I can say that I never have. When I first got my ipod, a little pink baby I pumped it full of music that I downloaded illegally from frostwire.com After a while my dad had to do away with frostwire because he began to put two and two together as to why my computer was getting viruses. But now as of 2011 I have discovered the power of youtube-mp3. Pretty much it’s a conversion website where you can put it ANY and I mean ANY url of anything on youtube (it doesn’t even need to be a song) and it will convert it to an mp3 file for you and bam free music. Although very illegal and kinda bad because it does make artists lose money it is very convenient for broke people (like me!!!!!). Even though google tried to shut it down for a while overall the power of free music prevailed and the website came back up. So that’s the whole thing, that content being free is the best option and even if it’s not the main option people will always find a way around it.
“Controlling copies (once created by the author or by a third party) becomes a complex challenge. You can either control something very tightly, limiting distribution to a small, trusted group, or you can rest assured that eventually your product will find its way to a large nonpaying audience – if anyone cares to have it in the first place” Here’s where I’d like to talk about wikipedia. Anyone can write anything on wikipedia, was the case up till recently. Partially because it wasn’t getting enough funding and partially because it’s such a huge pot of knowledge it was hard to control. There was an imaginary murder of a man named Andre Marshall in Bridgeport, Connecticut which was on wikipedia from October 30th, 2006 to August 26th, 2013. Wikipedia has just recently tightened their posting rules which makes it harder now for just anyone to post on their website.
Overall though this article was very business(y) and difficult to read so I hope that I understood its content correctly.
Intro. to Multimedia Comp SP14 
I agree with you! Right from the first sentence, I lost a little bit of credibility in Dyson’s article because of the sentence about things being hard to find online. Then again, this was written in a time when there was maybe 0.05% on the Internet compared to what’s there now.
To answer your question, I’ve paid for a very small amount of my iTunes library. I had to purchase flute songs I was preparing for the end-of-semester juries because LimeWire (I guess a sister to FrostWire) didn’t have it; it wasn’t popular enough.
Thanks for your suggestion of the YouTube-to-mp3 converter! That’ll definitely come in handy for the instrumental pieces that are only popular to band nerds that post videos of them playing it.