publication date: Jul 7, 2009
I read the book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price
(Hyperion) by Chris Anderson, hoping for a balanced discussion about the upside
and downside of "free" content taken from both a company's and
consumer's perspective and was sorely disappointed. The book is nothing more
than a slapped together, superficial summary about how wonderful it supposedly
is for companies to give away things for free and find other ways to soak
consumers.
Free is poorly written and researched so I wasn't surprised
to recently
learn that much of the book's content was plagiarized from Wikipedia
(the "free" online reference that is well known for being rife with errors and
bias) among other sources! Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review
exposed the extensive plagiarism in Free. "Though reproducing words or original
ideas from any uncredited source is widely defined as plagiarism, using text
from Wikipedia presents an even more significant problem than reproducing
traditional copyrighted text...Anderson would be required to credit all
contributors to the quoted passages, license his modifications under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, note that the original work
has been modified, and provide the text of or a link to the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike license. Anderson
has not done any of these things in Free," says Jaquith.
I've
written about "free" financial content online and
exposed what goes on behind the scenes. There is no discussion about the
downside for consumers of "free" in Anderson's
book. I wonder why the author didn't give away his book for free? I wonder why
he doesn't go to doctors who give away their service for free?