After his keynote address at the Festival of Ideas for the New City, which is happening right now in New York, everyone’s favorite dreadlocked web critic Jaron Lanier fielded a good question from a person particularly interested in an Internet where creative types can actually get paid for their work: Sean Lennon. “When everything goes on sale for free, everyone is like ‘yay!’” noted the musician, his iPad under-arm. “But when the prices go back up — how do you make that transition? It’s almost like the cat’s let out of the bag. How do you get it back?” I captured the exchange on video, above.Thom Yorke notwithstanding, Lanier’s vision of a single-copy-web and a new kind of Internet social contract – one by which we not only start paying for the bits we consume but also get paid for the bits we produce – can be pretty hard to swallow for generations weaned on streaming gigabytes of free stuff at will. It’s a conundrum Sean’s dad might have found a way to dream about: Imagine all the people… getting rewarded for their creativity, with some cash, maybe a discount on their Internet bill.
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