Reminder: the internet didn't invent "free"
... nor infringement or illegal access!
There's an absurd idea gaining traction that the internet is somehow solely responsible for the public's expectation that things, media, and online news in particular, should be free.
And that this expectation is fatally flawed.
I'm hearing this with increasing frequency - on the TV (e.g. Jane Moore on Andrew Marr, 30th May 2010), on the radio (I caught several Radio 4 guests alluding to this) and the few online who dare to side with Murdoch and his paywalls.
Has no-one else twigged? Broadcast media has from its inception until fairly recently been free to access. There were no paywalls for the first commercial radio stations of the 20's, nor for the first TV stations.
It wasn't until cable TV took off in the mid 1970's that pay-to-access became a commercial priority for broadcasters in the US.
Less than 20 years later the world wide web was created; and we're back to free.
Cable has a physical property that makes it relatively easy to charge a subscription, however that doesn't prevent stealing, and didn't stop the "home hook-ups" of the 80's (aka sharing or stealing your neighbour's cable). The lack of encryption also meant connections and disconnections had to be managed at a local switching centre, which was a bit of an overhead.
Commercial (direct-to-home, DTH) satellite services were then born in the 80's, but it wasn't until 1985 that the first commercial conditional access (i.e. encrypted broadcast) was launched by HBO.
Early encryption techniques for analogue TV signals were weak, which lead to a massive black market in "illegal" satellite receivers, especially in Europe. Whether the encryption used by European broadcaster FilmNet was weaker than the system used in the US or whether the fact that some FilmNet channels screened hardcore adult movies, thereby increasing the incentive for hackers, cannot easily be determined!
Either way, only 8 years elapsed between the launch of commercial broadcasting using conditional access and the "real" start of the web in 1993. I know the first website was created before this, but it wasn't until people got their hands on the Mosaic web browser that the web as we know it began.
Whilst one could argue the internet is not simply a broadcast medium like terrestrial radio, cable or satellite, newspapers don't really use the internet today for much other than broadcasting their content to the masses.
So there you have it. Broadcast radio stations of the 1920's created "free", not the internet.
Pieces of copper wire were the pioneering tool of copyright infringement, the torrents of the 1970's and 80's, being used extensively in illegal cable hook-ups. And that's not forgetting an honourable mention for VHS, Betamax and C90 audio cassettes - the "hard disks" of the 70's, 80's and early 90's, used extensively for illegal home taping and exchanged by excitable schoolchildren for decades before Napster.
Subscription TV only really took off less than 20 years before the start of the internet, but free TV had been around for 45 years before that, and free radio for 55 years.
Free-to-air broadcast TV and radio has continued around the world despite the launch of conditional access systems at the end of the 20th century, yet somehow free media when available over the internet is a modern invention and should be viewed as an immoral and unsustainable passing fad responsible for the imminent death of journalism and the creative industries.
Did I mention free newspapers?!