Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams published Wikinomics in 2006. Along with Chris Anderson's The Long Tail theory, this is the other "big idea" about business and commerce in the online age.
1. Peering
Free sharing of material on the internet is good news for businesses when it cuts distribution costs to almost zero but bad news for people who want to protect their creative material and ideas as intellectual property (IP).
The music business in the online age presents a balanced argument of positives and negatives of free sharing online
Positives:
"Spotify", "We7" and "LastFM" are all examples of free music sharing websites that are legally allowed to let the public listen to hundreds of thousands of playlists for free whilst online. This is made legal as the distributors of these sites will pay a proportion of copyright money to the artists that appear on their music database- therefore some revenue is still produced from the free listening. Advertising and marketing of the music on the site will also generate a revenue to keep the websites running.
Negatives:
Illegal sharing websites such as "Limewire" and torrent websites such as "Bittorrent" use downloaded content from the web and allow people to download it at absolutely no cost. Extreme cases of download have resulted in heavy fines if caught by the police and in 2009 a woman in America who had downloaded over 15000 songs and videos via limewire faced a fine of £1 per song. Artists do not allow their music to be given out for free as it generates no revenue to them, and large metal band Metallica quoted "I wouldn't ask you to come and fix my plumbing for free so you can't have our work for free".
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