Sir, – John Horgan's piece on the threats posed to independent journalism by the online culture is not only timely but relevant to almost every other area of human endeavour that involves innovation or creativity ("How Facebook and Google are killing independent journalism", Opinion & Analysis, July 13th).
The collapse in the income of musicians has been well aired, but people working in other sectors like film-making, book publishing, product design and even medical and scientific research are all likely to suffer similarly catastrophically if a sustainable method of rewarding creators in the internet age is not quickly agreed, implemented and enforced internationally.
Sadly, very few people are prepared to pay voluntarily for something they can have for nothing. Every year, new technological advances – faster broadband speeds, 3D printing – make more of the world’s creative output freely available to billions at the click of a mouse. Neither legal nor technological barriers can be expected to withstand this tsunami of digital access and entitlement.
I personally believe that the simplest and most logical method of addressing this problem would be to introduce a substantial annual government levy on every broadband connection and mobile phone, to be redistributed proportionally to the creators whose content is most eagerly consumed via those portals.
All innovation – and by extension, all human progress – is essentially a numbers game: give enough monkeys a typewriter and you’ll get a Shakespeare. But the corollary is also true: the fewer innovators that we as a society fund to apply themselves full time to their chosen quest, the more we as a society in the long run will suffer.
Ireland happens to be both a small nation which needs to be paid for the output of its nimble brains rather than its industrial brawn if it is to thrive, and the European home for Facebook, Google and almost all the other tech giants whose products and practices have destroyed the ability of creators globally to be fairly rewarded for the intellectual property they create.
This gives us both a unique interest and a uniquely loud voice in this most urgent international debate. We should take that responsibility very seriously. – Yours, etc,
NICK KELLY,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.