I tend to side with Chris Anderson, Mike Masnick and other free proponents, but Malcolm Gladwell makes salient observations in his review/counter-point of Anderson's new book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price." The following excerpt deflates grandiose notions of free economies revolutionizing society:

Anderson begins the second part of his book by quoting Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties that "our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.

Anderson wants to take "too cheap to meter" seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own "too cheap to meter" revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson's argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss's prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true. [Emphasis included in original.]

I appreciate Gladwell's perspective because he's anchoring the free discussion in reality. Free isn't a cure-all, nor does it apply to every market or product. But in my sandbox -- digital content -- it absolutely factors into the gameplan because virtually all digital material can be copied infinitely with no degradation. When you're dealing with an infinite good, you have to acknowledge the limits and opportunities of giving that material away because a certain percentage of the consumer population is going to take and copy it anyway. You can spin your wheels with DRM and lawsuits, or you can accept the reality and find ways to use freely distributed content to convert readers/viewers/users into customers who pay for related, naturally-scarce products. To me -- and to most non-utopian, normal folks -- free isn't a cultural movement, paradigm shift, or religion. It's a tool.