Dominic Young

Writings and more

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about

I’ve been around the news media and the internet since the beginning. I am interested in copyright as the basis for a thriving and balanced creative sector and society. Also interested in how the failure of copyright and other laws has led to terrible outcomes for the internet and everyone who uses it. I’ve done a lot of things around these issues.

Category: Economics

  • Actually doing it

    As some people will notice, my flurries of activity on this blog and elsewhere are somewhat random. I am deeply passionate about the issues around copyright, because they impinge so heavily on so many other things – economic, cultural, political, personal. One of the reasons I have written about it is to try to explain…

  • Permissions, babies and bathwater

    A few months ago I started seeing this when I went to Google sites…     Kind of funny, the privacy reminder. I’m guessing most people don’t see this because most people are logged in to Google most of the time and so have accepted their terms explicitly when they log in. But I’m not.…

  • Fearlessly speaking common sense

    I have often made the observation that for the business of media to work well commercially, there has to be a link between popular success and commercial reward. One of the great frustrations of the internet has been that this is, largely, no longer true: even staggeringly popular sites like MailOnline (117m monthly unique users)…

  • No to Google News: common sense or suicide? – An update

    Well that didn’t take long. Apparently the Brazilian boycott of Google News has cost them just 5% of their traffic. They think that’s “a price worth paying”. I’d say so too. I don’t know how their revenues stack up but I would be surprised if the financial cost was much greater than zero. As Techcrunch…

  • That’s not the answer; now, what’s the question?

    David Leigh came up with an idea to “save newspapers”. Every broadband customer would be forced to pay £2 per month to fund newspapers. Lots was subsequently written about it, most of it contemptuous. The problems with this idea are so obvious and numerous that I didn’t bother writing anything about it to add to…

  • Copyright and money: spot the difference

    By me in City AM… I’ll post it here later but in the meantime head over there

  • The Guardian: a dating site which runs a newspaper on the side

    Digital first, redundancies second, profits last Just over a year ago The Guardian announced its new strategy to go “digital first” and move its efforts away from print towards the internet. My post about it at the time was titled, perhaps a little cynically, “throwing in the towel”. Their plan was to increase digital revenues…

  • Giving copyright the $5m finger

    Check this out. bo.lt is a startup in what seems to have become the classic west coast model. Silly domain name? Check! Bullshit mission statement? Check! SF address and previous startup credentials Check! Big money funding? Check! Business model entirely dependent on other peoples content? Check! It’s really extraordinary. Let me quote from the website:…

  • Perfect economies

    Is free really a radical price or just radically irrational? Some say content will become free as a matter of economic necessity. That as the cost of copies of content approaches zero, so will its price. That we are in the grip of an all-powerful economic principle which will sweep whole industries before it, and…