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Free Ride is the book for Net utopians who have been mugged by insolvency Illustration by Yarek Waszul
Editor's Rating: 
Free Ride: How Digital Parasites
Are Destroying the Culture Business,
and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back
By Robert Levine
Doubleday; 320pp; $26.95
The decade before this one was rife with stories of how uncool it is to expect money for online-accessible content. In 2000, Lars Ulrich of the band Metallica was condemned as a greedy, out-of-touch “cyber narc” for daring to take on the file-sharing service Napster in court. Five years later, the New York Times was widely mocked for its first attempt at a paywall, TimesSelect, which charged users for the right to read its Op-Ed columnists and tap into its archives online. After an ignominious two years, the program was scrapped.
Yet this past March, the Times reinstituted a paywall program: a necessary measure, publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. said, to “strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform.” Now, as if to bolster Sulzberger’s resolve, comes Free Ride, Robert Levine’s unrelenting indictment of the free-content ethos that has dominated digital activism. Know that old Irving Kristol maxim that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality? Well, Free Ride is the book for the Net utopian who has been mugged by insolvency. It’s a riposte of sorts to Chris Anderson’s 2009 book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which posits that in the digital economy, “free is not just an option, it’s the inevitable endpoint.”
Levine, a former executive editor of Billboard magazine, is here to say that this line of thinking is, to use the clinical macroeconomics term, a load of bollocks. The model of offering up content for free and making up for this lost revenue stream through advertising may work well for the likes of Google, YouTube, and the Huffington Post, but it’s hell on the original-content creators upon which these sites ultimately depend: the professional class of reporters, authors, musicians, filmmakers, and producers whose work—books, articles, songs, TV shows, and movies—is still what the public is ultimately looking for.
One of the strengths of Free Ride is that it is not the spittle-laced jeremiad of a content creator wronged but a turbo-reported (if undeniably opinionated) analysis of how we’ve arrived at this circumstance. Levine focuses on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a U.S. law passed in 1998 to address the legality or illegality of materials disseminated in digital formats. The cultural climate of the Nineties seemed to favor the tech companies that found copyright laws too strict and were, after all, ushering in the Internet Age. Addressing the “Governments of the Industrial World” in a 1996 manifesto, the sometime Grateful Dead lyricist and early digital activist John Perry Barlow declared, “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”
In Levine’s view, the promise of a lightly regulated, copyright-averse, freebie-laden Internet has unraveled much in the same way that late-Sixties experiments in free love and communal living curdled into Seventies nightmares of hard drugs, broken families, and leaky geodesic domes. In the world of news-gathering, he laments, “Aggregators like Google News and the Huffington Post excerpt or summarize the work of other publications without adding much to it, besides a link that few readers follow”—all the while competing for the same ad dollars as the endangered, cash-strapped organizations that actually put reporters on the ground. What’s more, the newspapers’ expectation that Internet ad prices would someday approach the level of print ones has not panned out. Levine cites a study that says an average print reader is worth $539 to an advertiser, while an average online reader is worth only $26.
