I can see it now: 15th century Europe, the first issues of the Gutenberg Bible have come out, identically beautiful and reproduced with high fidelity in unprecedented numbers. A scriptorum in a Catholic monastery is abuzz with anxious speculation: what does this all mean? The professional copyists are going to be out of work, centuries of tradition down the john. With books readily available, education becomes more accessible and the power of the literati is diminished. Why, even the unwashed peasants might learn to read, which is... kind of scary. Heck, they might even start reading the Bible by themselves, a blasphemy! What's next? Rumors, heresies previously only whispered, now indiscriminately printed on paper and disseminated to everyone? Now the authority of the King and Pope can be questioned in public... and yet anonymously, and with huge circulation! You can spread heresy to people you haven't even MET yet! Horrible! The world will never be the same.

Five hundred years later, information technology takes another step forward, creating new institutions and making old ones obsolete. You know, this is actually kind of fun, just as it must've been in Gutenberg's day, unless you were a copyist in a medieval scriptorum, a species headed for swift extinction.

Thing is, humanity always does its own thing, and trying to stop it (or heck, legislate against it) is useless and even destructive. Best buckle up and enjoy the ride... and figure out if your trade is going to become obsolete, so that you can learn a new one before it's too late.

Gutenberg printed books but it was Aldus who came up with the stroke of genius to make books small enough to be portable in a saddlebag. Before him printed books were massive things chained to lecterns. With books being portable it was inevitable that literacy spread and people had access to books.

I defiantly gave up my WSJ.com subscription this summer when it appeared the Journal's owners cared more about money than editorial freedom by selling out to Murdoch. I refuse to pay a cent to monopolists who push a nutty and extreme right wing point of view (same for the extreme lefties but they don't own any media properties). Murdoch's only saving grace is that he is good at business. I just don't want to pay to support him or his views.

And now he's talking about making WSJ.com free and making my meaningless protest even more futile. I have to decide if I still want to read the Journal online if it's free.

This news story also came with a quote from Murdoch that he expects advertising revenues to be significantly higher than the $50 million a year generated by the site's subscription fees. That business model works, apparently.

As for local and regional print papers, the jury is still out of course. We gave up our daily paper and only get the Sunday paper for the comics. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Hopefully, it is still possible to provide great content and make money for the content creators, not just the media barons like Murdoch.

Look back to the beginnings of the movie business. What you’ll see is almost exactly the type of entrepreneurial landscape that he describes.

Now look at broadcasting, it’s an entirely different animal, a few large companies distributing all the content.

What’s the difference between these two entertainment businesses and how did they evolve into what we see today?

Well the independent movie producer had no control over the distribution of his product, that was controlled by the theater owners, and the theater owners soon became what we know as the big studios today.

In the early days of movies it didn’t take much in the way of technology to make a picture, but as audiences became more sophisticated production values had to improve.

Look at how far we’ve come from the Keystone cops, to Star Wars. You can make the Keystone Cops with a Hi Def camera and an iMac for peanuts, but a production like Star Wars costs millions.

Broadcasting is changing that’s true but no matter what the pipeline, whether it’s over the air, cable, or the Internet the pipeline is going to continue to be controlled by large companies. I don’t know which ones that will turn out to be. It may be the ones that are currently in control, such as NBC – GE. Time Warner, Viacom, and Murdock’s News Corp.

Why? Because creative people want to create, financiers on the other hand want to make money. I don’t believe that the demise of the music industry is necessarily a viable example to use when looking at more complex forms of entertainment. One person can write their own songs, perform record and produce a finished product with fairly simple tools. Movies and TV, no matter how they are distributed, are multi disciplinary products. They require a lot of talent, both artistic and technical, and the best model for organizing such an enterprise is the one that has evolved from those early days over a hundred years ago.

The artist that can accomplish such a thing is a rare bird. You need the poet and the financier to produce multimedia content, and that means someone is going to be the employer and someone else is going to be the employee, as for the terms of the agreement between them, stay tuned.