A few days ago, the Financial Times did a long interview with eBay’s Meg Whitman. At one point, she was asked to respond to the skepticism regarding eBay’s ability to “monetize” Skype, the internet phone service it acquired last year. She answered:

Well I certainly hope we’re gonna be able to monetize it! … If you have the largest ecosystem, then you will be the one who will actually figure out the long-term monetization model. And I think telephony will be a part of that. Skype and voicemail in what we do today, but also ecommerce applications, content applications; we will figure out how to monetize the largest user base on the Net. And we already have some ideas; there’s already a number of trials in place. And the good news is we have a stream of revenues called telephony revenues that enable us to continue to grow quite fast while we’re testing and trying to figure out the new monetization models …

And so, that’s why we were so excited when we saw Skype because I said, you know what, there’s something here that will unlock the Skype business, and will enable each business to grow on its own. So, people will understand as we deliver the results, and you know, I have great confidence that this was a smart thing to do … Because in the end, the monetization, I think, is going to be around ecommerce, not telephony. And guess who has the biggest ecommerce franchise in the world, that can accelerate the growth of Skype? So, we’ll see.

“We’ll figure it out.” “There’s something here.” “We already have some ideas.” “We’ll see.” I wonder how many other multibillion-dollar acquisitions have taken place before the acquiring company had “figured out” how to actually make money from the deal. I know there’ve been plenty where the acquirer’s money-making strategy turned out to be pure fantasy, but how many have there been where there wasn’t any strategy, where the justification boiled down to “don’t worry, we’ll figure it out later.”

You can build a religion on faith, but building a company on it seems pretty dicey. At least eBay makes a lot of money in its core business. It can afford to have patience and do “a number of trials” and hope for the best. And it can afford to make mistakes, even if they end up costing a billion or two. If Skype falls short of earning back its price, it’s not the end of the world.

You have to wonder, though, about other companies that are making it up as they go along. I think most Web 2.0 businesses fall into that category, but my favorite at the moment is YouTube. Even in these days of cheap storage and bandwidth, YouTube is burning through a ton of money to store and stream its mountain of bit-heavy, user-generated videos like the future Oscar contender Ass Hand. Fearing lawsuits or PR disasters related to the corruption of youth, it’s now also going to have to put in place costly screening procedures – having people review uploaded pictures and videos is reportedly the latest chore that companies are outsourcing to the Third World. If the big costs weren’t bad enough, there are competitors sprouting up all over the place, including heavyweights like Google with cash flow out the wazoo.

YouTube’s only hope, so far as I can see, is for an eBay-like company to come along and buy it in the hope it will eventually be able to “figure out” how to make money off all the traffic. It’s the greater fool theory of monetization.

I didn’t think it was possible to write a great poem about rock n roll, but Paul Muldoon proves me wrong with Sillyhow Stride, his elegy for Warren Zevon.

The normally sensible David Berlind goes into all sorts of funny contortions to justify ripping off public radio programs. Look, This American Life charges for downloads and podcasts of its programs. That’s the only fact that matters. It means if you download those programs without paying for them, you’re guilty of taking a five-finger discount. And if you write and post links for the express purpose of helping other people take the programs without paying for them, you’re making a mistake. The degree of technical difficulty involved in any of this is immaterial.

Anyway, wouldn’t it be easier to just pay the lousy $3.95 and be done with it?

I enjoyed Robert McIlree’s post about the cuttings and pastings of schoolkids and what may be different now that such copying has been automated, reduced from longhand transcription to a couple of clicks. I liked, as well, Tanya’s comment on the post: “We have an interesting solution of the problem here in Russia. Students of the high school are not allowed to hand in their reports, papers and synopsis processed, only hand written. At least this is the ‘policy’ of Helen’s Academy. It works.”

That’s a good word, “longhand.” You almost never hear it any more, though. It’s fading away.

Christina Rosen reviews InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds’s book, An Army of Davids, in the New Republic. After documenting the “idiocies and dangers” of Reynolds’s brand of web-triumphalism, Rosen places Reynolds and his ilk both inside and outside the long tradition of techno-utopianism:

The old futurism celebrated the expert and venerated the scientist who could master and harness technology. Reynolds will have none of this. InstaPundit resides in a world where technology can be harnessed by any semi-literate with a PC. His hero is the guy without any expertise who can see through the palaver of elites. There’s no need to accumulate expertise through years of study or experience, because the Internet has become the great repository of knowledge and experience. You have to admire his argumentative boldness. He has taken figures who have been historic punch lines – the dilettante, the hack – and turned them into civilizational saviors.

This American Life, the popular public radio show, allows you to listen to its programs for free over the web. If you want to own a copy to play offline, you can buy a downloadable file or a podcast for a few bucks through Audible or iTunes or a CD version for a bit more. It’s money that goes to what many would consider a good cause, and, even if it weren’t, This American Life has every right to sell its property in whatever way it wants and for whatever price it chooses. As it explains on its site:

This American Life podcasts are available to weekly subscribers at Audible.com. There is a fee for shows delivered via podcasting, the same as other TAL episodes purchased through Audible or the Apple Music Store. These fees provide a small stream of money – not much, to be sure, but some – that we split with the show’s contributors. We think it’s fair for them to be compensated for their work.

Recently, apparently, This American Life began to stream its programs in unprotected MP3 format rather than in RealAudio format. It did not, however, change any of its policies. It still charges for file downloads, podcasts and CDs. But because the source files are now unprotected MP3s, it’s possible, with a simple technical trick, to bypass the streamed video and swipe – I believe “swipe” is the right term – the source files without paying for them. Writing recently on his Info World blog, Jon Udell described how easy this is:

Until about a month ago … I was relying on an mplayer hack to move some of my favorite public radio shows onto my MP3 player. The other week, though, I noticed that although the archive page at This American Life still says that you can’t download files, it’s not true anymore. Last week’s episode, for example, was a rerun of a classic on stories that make us cringe. The offered link is http://audio.wbez.org/tal/182.m3u. If you unpack that you’ll find http://audio.wbez.org/tal/182.mp3. When I noticed this change, I made myself an unofficial TAL feed with enclosures.

In an update to the post, he provided a link to another site, called “Unofficial This American Life Podcast,” which makes swiping the files even easier, by providing direct links for downloading all the underlying MP3s. Nowhere does the owner of this site mention that This American Life charges for downloads.

Now, Jon Udell is an honorable guy, and I’m sure he doesn’t think of downloading those files as an act of thievery in any way, shape or form. But what kind of strange logic leads someone to say that “although the archive page at This American Life still says that you can’t download files, it’s not true anymore.” That’s like saying that if I go out to the supermarket and leave my front door unlocked, then it’s ok to come into my house and steal my china. Just because something’s not locked up doesn’t mean you can help yourself to it.

Today, Udell reports that he received a request from This American Life to take down his unofficial feed from his site. “You’re violating our copyright,” it said, “and we’re obligated to protect it.” Udell responded by disabling the feed, “at least temporarily.” But he chafed at the request, responding, “I did not post MP3s in violation of your copyright, and would never do such a thing. I simply posted a file that contains links to the MP3s that you have posted on your site.” That may be technically correct, but it seems disingenuous. It would be one thing – and even this would be murky – if This American Life didn’t charge for downloads. But it does.

In responding to Udell’s post, Ted Roche says it’s “a disturbing idea … that a producer of copyright content could demand you take down links pointing to their content.” But let’s be clear: these aren’t links to the free streams (the “offered links,” as Udell describes them); they’re links specifically created to provide access to products that are sold for a fee. “Aggregation and linkage is the point of the web,” says Roche. “Don’t fight it.” Anyone’s free to criticize This American Life for its business policies. But you’re not free to circumvent those policies just because you don’t like them. If you take someone’s property without paying for it – or even if you help others to do it – you’re breaking the law. Shouldn’t that be as true on the web as off it?

By the way, I don’t actually own any china, so you’d just be wasting your time.

All technological change is generational change. The transitional generations – the in-betweeners with five toes in the old world, five in the new – never see things clearly. You couldn’t even say they see through a glass darkly; it’s a bright mirror they’re looking into. They assume that what’s to come will be a perfect mashup of what they think was good about the old and what they think is good about the new. But that’s not how it works. Technological change, and the economic change it produces, is not a moral force; it’s simply an implacable force. “We’re making the technologies,” says John Brockman. “Then the technologies make us.”

Patrick Ross, of the Center for the Study of Digital Property, shares a tale from the home front:

A few months ago my 11-year-old daughter was researching a paper on Jesse Owens for social studies. She didn’t go to the library, pull down reference books and fill up 3×5 index cards. She went onto Google. She found plenty of materials. But when I asked to read her completed paper, it was nothing but a cut-and-paste job from various web sites on Owens; she even included, quite randomly, part of a press release about some recent celebration in his honor.

My daughter’s work ethic may not always be what I’d like it to be, but she’s bright and can write more than sufficiently for a 5th grade social studies class. Yet she seemed flat-out baffled when I explained to her that the paper wasn’t acceptable. “Is the information wrong?” she asked. “Did I leave something out?” No to both. But she hadn’t written her own paper, and more importantly, she hadn’t learned anything, as was clear when I began to quiz her about the content in her own “paper.” Hard to transfer knowledge in the two seconds it takes to select and move.

Click click. Cut and paste.

“The ultimate search engine,” says Larry Page, “would understand everything in the world.” Just like Patrick Ross’s daughter understands Jesse Owens.

Ross offers a second tale:

A few weeks ago, I was doing some intellectual property research and was reading materials on a WIPO-affiliated web site. A Google search on a narrow topic I wanted more information on suggested a Wikipedia entry as my first choice … so I pulled up the link. Lo and behold, the exact text I had just read on the WIPO site was in the Wikipedia entry, but there was no indication it came from WIPO.

Click click. Cut and paste.

“We’re already taking back the Internet,” says Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia. “With your help, we can take back the world.”

From whom, Jimmy? From whom?

Ross points to a BBC article on the way “many of the new generation of students raised on the internet see nothing wrong with copying other people’s work.” “I just couldn’t say it better myself,” they’ll explain, so why not cut and paste? I mean, why give us the Internet if you don’t want us to use it?

The issue isn’t plagiarism. The issue is the meaning of “understanding” and how it’s changing.

Here’s Mark Cuban, another Internet billionaire: “In the past, you had to memorize knowledge because there was a cost to finding it. Now, what can’t you find in 30 seconds or less? We live an open-book-test life that requires a completely different skill set.”

Click click. Cut and paste.

A completely different skill set.

Andrew Keen is aghast: “We have created technology that is encouraging a culture of intellectual kleptocracy and all anyone wants to talk about is rights.”

But the road ahead is paved with the yellow bricks of good intentions, Andrew. It must be leading to a happy place. And, besides, we’re the in-betweeners. We’ll all be comfortably dead by the time our grandchildren pass through the gates of Oz.