WHEN IS A FREE DOWNLOAD NOT?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 11:28:13 -0800
To: dave () farber net
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] WHEN IS A FREE DOWNLOAD NOT?

[Note:  Glenn is a reader of this list.  My heart goes out to him on
this one.  I also admit that I was one of the folks who downloaded
the file.  I also purchased a copy of the book.  DLH]

WHEN IS A FREE DOWNLOAD NOT?

It seemed like a good idea at the time -- author Glen Fleishman reasoned
that by offering his book, "Real World Adobe GoLive 6," as a free download,
he might be able to kickstart sales, which were languishing. Rather than
taking the time to download the 922 pages of the PDF file, maybe readers
would decide to buy a hard copy on Amazon or elsewhere. It turns out that
instead of the few hundred downloads that Fleishman was anticipating, the
book was downloaded 10,000 times in just 36 hours, racking up a bandwidth
bill of $15,000 (Fleishman's provider, Level 3, charges incrementally for
bandwidth used). "It's a financial catastrophe. I'm a working stiff with a
mortgage. I never suspected the penalty would be so high for giving
something away. It's like living in Singapore and getting 15 years in jail
for chewing gum. I was aware I would be charged a fortune for high
bandwidth. But I never suspected we would have topped a few hundred
downloads." Fleishman could have made use of file-sharing networks like
Kazaa or Gnutella, which require users to bear the cost, says sci-fi author
Cory Doctorow, who recently released his first novel, "Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom," as a free download. Alternatively, Fleishman could have
released the book under an open Creative Commons license, which would have
allowed it to be posted to the Internet Archive and other open content Web
sites, says Doctorow. "It doesn't make any sense to be the sole point of
distribution for a file like this. It highlights the design flaw in the
client-server Internet. The more popular a file becomes, the more of a
penalty people pay to get it. I think the lesson is 'Use P2P networks.'"
(Wired.com 27 Mar 2003)

<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,58219,00.html>

Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>


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