Suggestion: Do not resist the Internet. You will fail.
The movie and music industries should take particular note.
Today I had a realization: I spend at least an order of magnitude more time consuming “synergistically distributed” entertainment content than I do “proprietary” entertainment content. Synergistically distributed content is content produced by people who want as many others as possible to freely consume it, like blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos. Proprietary content is content surrounded by a paywall, like newspapers, music, and movies.
The internet enables increasingly easy distribution of content. Going forward, proprietary content producers will suffer a corresponding increase in the difficulty of enforcing their paywalls. On the other hand, synergistic content providers will enjoy lower costs of and barriers to distribution and develop a correspondingly wider audience.
It seems very clear to me that content companies need to get on the right side of the internet-enabled distribution trend. Basically, if your business model hinges on your ability to control the spread of your content over the internet, you’re in for painful uphill battle. Instead you need to find a way to produce content which benefits you in proportion to its (free) distribution.