Sharing Is Caring

Clay Shirky tackles micro-payments once more:

Users like sharing. We like it so much, in fact, that we are willing to reward amateur outlets that enable it at the expense of professional ones that forbid it. (This is how Wikipedia rather than Britannica became the English-speaking world’s encyclopedia of choice.) This strong preference for sharing in turn means that nickel and diming us not only raises the cost of a piece of content, it sharply lowers the value as well, because payment systems have to forbid such sharing in order to function.

Seth Roberts forks over his two cents.