Right now there is a lot of confusion in the world of media, entertainment, and technology. With the advent of the digital distribution model we are being inundated with pressure to give our products away for free. Those questioning what to charge for their product stretches from musicians, filmmakers and television producers to authors, web developers and so on. When the price of making every subsequent copy of a product is zero there are bound to be some questions. This is not to mention that we, both publishers and consumers, often view the worth of something in relation to the medium it is published on. My last post touched on this idea, specifically in reference to Paul Graham’s fantastic essay ‘Post-Medium Publishing.’

No worries, though, plenty of smart people are already sharing many of their ideas on the matter. Representing the supporters-of-free group we have Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. In the other corner, those that support charging for your products per usual, we have Jason Fried and the whole 37Signals crew, a prominent software development house in Chicago.

I plan to firmly state my response to that debacle in next week’s post, but for now I wanted to focus on something that I’ve been thinking about all day. That would be my thoughts on Jason Fried’s talk [embedded below] from the Future of Web Apps conference about the business of by-products.

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