If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend this discussion between two of my favorite prognosticators, Charles Stross and Paul Krugman. There's a bunch of interesting play between the perspectives of the two intelligent guys, but the best bits are thrown in at the end once they really get going: copyrights, intellectual property, newspapers, financial ratings institutions, and how they all are interrelated, failing, and in need of a new approach.
Krugman, writer for the New York Times, is especially aware of that company's pending problem with paper subscribership, online consumption, and digital reproduction of their product. He points out the current dependance the paper has on the pleasant qualities a newspaper brings over a computer at breakfast, a "very thin lag in technology" that keeps the paper afloat because it is currently the best (most comfortable, 'normal', simple) news medium. One only needs to consider advances like the Amazon Kindle and RSS feeds and aggregators to remark upon how thin the lag is becoming.
Stross hits the big point, that the issue is one of information production on a much larger scale, where digital reproduction and the internet have replaced the librarian and made copyright irrelevant by eliminating the boundary that divided personal non-commercial reuse and for-profit redistribution. Stross himself releases many of his books, novellas, and short stories under a Creative Commons license, so it is especially interesting to hear his side of this issue.
There are two fascinating points, one by each theorist, that definitely deserve more consideration: bandwidth tax and non-compromised financial ratings. I suggest you read the original to learn how it all connects.
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