I agree that the times are changing. The Internet provides us with a means to share information quickly and cheaply, with a wider audience than ever before, and it allows anyone from a single person working alone to a global business to contribute that information initially.

But some things are not changing. Good content does not create itself. Most of the time, the best content is not created by hobbyists working in their spare time, either. We've been trying this experiment for a while now, and everything from Open Source software to self-published books paints a very clear and consistent picture: while there are the occasional gems, most of the work simply isn't very good by professional standards.

Creating the most informative, useful, interesting or entertaining content usually involves a lot of hard work. Often that work is done by a whole network of people with specialist skills. Often that work is not particularly enjoyable or glamorous. Often that work is not done by people who are going to reap vast rewards if the product is a hit, but rather by people paid a relatively low wage for their efforts. Still, the people doing that work have rent to pay and mouths to feed and interests of their own to support.

Now, I will be the first to agree that modern copyright laws in many jurisdictions have gone way too far in some respects. That is harmful to consumers, because it prevents them from doing otherwise reasonable things (or punishes them if they do those things anyway). IMHO, it is also harmful to businesses, because any law that loses the support of the public by going too far also loses any useful impact to the extent that the underlying idea is reasonable.

But a lot of the nay-sayers in this debate seem to see only the free side of this situation. They see that the marginal cost of distribution is now near zero, and conclude that everyone should be entitled to good content for free because it's out there anyway. They ignore, deliberately or out of ignorance, the often very high fixed costs associated with creating good content in the first place, or they decide (within some ethical framework that I have never understood) that it's OK for other people to contribute to that cost but they don't have to themselves. Then they rationalise their position with the kinds of excuse I mentioned before.

If this trend continues, we will develop an entire generation with a horribly damaging entitlement culture, and unless a viable alternative economic model develops sooner rather than later, content production will become a race to the bottom and good content (by today's professional standards) will become one of those mythical things we explain to our grandchildren starting with the words "When I was your age...".

This is not inevitable. All it takes to stop it is near-global standardisation on a fair economic framework that promotes the creation of good content. Whether that is copyright or something else is an interesting question. But as long as we confine the debate to a black-and-white "Big Media Bad, Cheap Freeloading Good" or "Cheap Freeloading Bad, Big Media Good" result, no real solution is going to get anywhere and we're just going to see a continuing arms race between commercial content producers and freeloaders with increasingly absurd penalties hitting the players on both sides when they lose.