[출처: CBS, 날짜: 2009-07-18]

지난 17일 서울 경기지역을 중심으로 최대 100mm가 넘는 많은 비가 내린 가운데 침수, 낙뢰 등 비피해가 속출했다. 18일 오전 7시를 기준으로 수원에 101mm, 양평 85mm, 홍천 82mm 등의 강수량을 기록했다. 특히 철원 일부지역에는 191mm, 연천군 127mm, 서울 서초구 99mm의 비가 내려 국지적으로 게릴라성 폭우가 쏟아졌다.
이에 따라 침수, 낙뢰 등 비피해도 잇따랐다. 17일 저녁 7시 40분쯤 수원시 영통구 법원지하차도 배수 펌프가 낙뢰에 의해 파손되면서 도로에 발목 높이까지 물이 차올라 이 일대 차량 통행이 다음날 오전까지 통제됐다. 이날 밤 9시쯤에는 경기도 용인시 포곡읍의 한 전신주 전선에 낙뢰가 내리치면서 6백여가구에 전력 공급이 끊겨 주민들이 불편을 겪었다.
서울 은평구 증산지하도에서는 오후 한때 폭우로 물이 차올라 택시가 고립됐으며, 경부고속도로 오산 톨게이트 부근에서 대형 컨테이너 차량이 빗길에 미끄러지는 사고가 발생해 정체가 빚어지기도 했다. 중앙재난안전대책본부에 따르면 18일 오전 6시를 기준으로 경기도 수원시 32가구 등 주택 56가구가 침수 피해를 입은 것으로 집계됐다.
설악산 국립공원은 9개 등산로의 입산이 금지된 상태이다. 서울 경기지역의 비는 현재는 소강상태를 보이고 있지만 18일 오후 늦게부터 다시 시간당 최고 100mm의 많은 비가 내릴 것으로 보인다. 기상청은 장마 전선이 남하하면서 18일 밤부터 천둥 번개를 동반한 강한 비가 올 것으로 예상하면서 침수나 산사태, 낙뢰 등 비피해에 주의할 것을 당부했다.

[참고] 보험료 비교는 인슈넷 23개 보험사 실시간 무료 비교견적서를 클릭하십시오.

출처: YTN동영상, 날짜:2009-07-18

[앵커멘트]
아파트 주차장마다 접촉사고나 음주운전 사고 등 차량 사고가 끊이지 않고 있습니다.
하지만 주차장 사고는 처벌 규정이 없어서 사고를 당해도 마땅히 하소연할 곳이 없습니다.
김혜은 기자가 보도합니다.

[리포트]

아파트 지하 주차장에 승용차 한 대가 들어가 주차된 차량 세 대를 잇따라 들이받습니다.
잠시 멈춘 뒤에 승용차는 그냥 달아나버립니다.
나오면서 다른 차와 또 부딪혔지만 이번에도 아랑곳하지 않습니다.
피해자들이 경찰서로 달려갔지만 경찰은 제대로 조서를 꾸미지도 않았습니다.

[녹취:피해자]

"가해자는 경찰서 가지도 않았다고 하던데요. 보상이 안되니까 개인적으로 소송을 해야 한다고 이야기를 들었거든요."
얼마전 아파트 주차장에서 승용차에 치여 병원 신세를 지고 있는 12살 김 모 양.
김 양의 부모는 운전자와 승강이를 벌였지만 치료비만 보험 처리해주겠다는 답변을 얻는데 그쳤습니다.

[녹취:피해자 어머니]
"보험으로만 미루면 우리는, 애 고통은 얼마나 심하겠으며 너무 억울하잖아요."
경찰은 주차장에서 난 사고는 처벌 대상이 아니라면서 손쓸 방법이 없다고 말합니다.

[녹취:담당 경찰관]
"주차장에서 잘못됐다고 단속하는 것은 없잖아요, 그죠? 벌점을 주면 우리가 잘못된 거잖아요." 주차장은 도로교통법에서 말하는 도로에 해당하지 않아 사고가 나도 경찰이 가해자를 처벌할 수 없습니다. 가해자가 버틸 경우 피해보상을 받기도 쉽지 않습니다.

이 때문에 주차장에서 사고를 당했을 때 배상을 받으려면 피해자가 직접 손해배상 청구 소송을 내는 수밖에 없습니다. 주차장 사고도 도로교통법으로 적용하는 길을 열어줘야 한다는 지적이 많습니다.

[인터뷰:김기홍, 한국교통시민협회 회장]
"정부에서도 법을 개정해서라도 모든 교통사고를 교통사고로 인정해줘야 합니다. 그래야만 피해자가 다소나마 구제를 받을 수 있고..." 아파트 주차장에서 온갖 사고가 잇따르고 있는데도 법은 여전히 가해자 편에 있습니다.

[참고] 보험료 비교는 인슈넷 23개 보험사 실시간 무료 비교견적서를 클릭하십시오.

It defies logic: after all, if you offer someone a free donut, he/she is going to take it because the price is zero, right? Well, not exactly. In the online world, there’s another equally important currency: availability. It can be defined by the number of steps it takes to do something or download some content. The bigger the number of steps, the bigger the cost of the product/service.

Free Donuts, But With a Catch

Let’s go back to the donut analogy. Many opponents of the economy of free say: if you give donuts for free, and the guy next to you tries to sell them at any price, he will inevitably lose because no one will buy them. But this criticism doesn’t take into account the number of steps required to retrieve the donut (which is a very important part of every online experience.) So, the real analogy would be this: if you offer donuts for free, but anyone who wants them has to run three circles around the nearby building to get one, many people will simply pay, for example, $1 for the donut if it means they can just take it immediately.

Recently, we’ve written about research which shows that kids in the UK pirate music less due to the rise of music streaming services. This is because music streaming is so easy, that it makes it cheaper (time is money, remember) than to search for a song on a torrent site, although the price of both services is zero.

Competing With Free

So, how do you compete with free? Let’s say that your product is a music album, which can be digitally duplicated at zero cost, and therefore it’s all over torrent sites, P2P networks and blogs. Sounds like a disaster, but it’s actually not that hard to compete with that. You can create a fantastic web site which offers all of the albums of that particular band, as well as many other albums, neatly organized and easy to search. Then, you can offer additional perks to people who download the album (I’m not talking about buying it yet, I’ll get to that bit later), such as free concert tickets, merch, access to rarities, singles, unreleased materials, live recordings, bootlegs, lyrics, guitar tabs, etc. Then, there’s the technical side: you can offer very fast downloads. You can have ads that are less annoying than those on torrent sites. In short, you can create a great user experience. I’ve covered this part of the story in an earlier article on piracy and the reasons why it works.

But I’ll take it a step forward. Here’s a bold theory: free will not last forever. No one has to be afraid of free, because it’s just a transitional phase in the history of the Internet. The current trend, where everything seems to lose value, and the price of all digital content seems to inevitably spiral towards zero, will reverse – at least for some types of content.

The Price is Not Only Money; It’s Also the Time it Takes to Pay

And here’s the reason: currently, paying for something online is, in most cases, too complicated. How hard can it be to just punch in your credit card number, one might ask? It’s very hard. It’s unbelievably hard in an environment where people are used to getting everything with a couple of mouse clicks. You have to own a credit card; if you do, you have to find it; you have to punch in a long number, then you have to punch in another, and a date. And on many sites, if you haven’t shopped there before, you have to register first, which adds to the annoyance.

If you think that telling people that getting the same content for free, with a couple of clicks, is evil, will make them go through this process, then you do not understand how the Internet has changed our collective mind. One click – one single click – can make the difference between yes, please, and no, thank you. Any blog owner who has added a RSS subscription button knows that it works infinitely better if it only takes one click. Add just another click – a landing page where you explain what RSS is, for example – and you’ll get a lot less subscribers.

An example that defies the notion that all digital content is going to be valued at zero dollars is Steam. You know why? You pay once, subscribe once, and then you just download games (*Update: this bit requires some explanation. When I say “pay once, subscribe once” I mean set up your payment details once, and they’re remembered between sessions; games are automatically updated; plus, SteamSteam lets you purchase multiple games at once. But most importantly, the entire process is so easy, and the Steam content distribution system offers so many perks, that it beats downloading games illegally. For more about Steam, go here). For a lot of people, that fact that it actually costs money is overshadowed by the simplicity of the experience. Many gamers have told me: look, I used to pirate games and spend days looking for cracks and serials, but now I just use Steam. It’s so much better.

This works for all content. Lately, we hear newspaper owners huff and puff about their demise, blaming it on anyone but themselves. I feel for them; it’s a complicated issue, but they have to figure the best way to resolve it. If I click a link on the Wall Street Journal and I get the notice “sorry, this is for subscribers only,” I’m just gonna go away. If I were to click the same link, and someone, somewhere, took 20 cents from me, without the need for my intervention, I’d be OK with it. But if what you offer behind that link is already available on 20 other free sites, then I won’t be OK with it. If I’m a stock broker and need to have that news the second it’s out, then I’ll be willing to pay even more. Are there enough stock brokers out there to justify a pay wall which annoys all other readers? It’s up to WSJ to find out.

The Wrong Way

Unfortunately, there’s a problem here that goes beyond the survival of an industry and threatens to change the way we use and perceive the Internet, as well as our online privacy and freedom. The entertainment industry and the media industry know that getting people to pull out their wallet is the hardest thing, so they’re trying to shove it down our throats. They think that they can charge their content in the same way a country collects tax from the people. It’ll never work. First of all, not all content can be charged for. Some content – news is a good example – will always have a tendency to be free. Video games, music and movies may not be worth more than zero if we’re talking about a digital file on your hard disk, but if you add the user experience and the extra value you can tie to them, there will always be a business model for selling them.

So instead of putting pressure on governments to adopt stupid laws and on ISPs to act like policemen, judge and jury, the industries mentioned should work to figure out which model works best for them. Some companies will fail, and go bankrupt. That’s OK: when the car came, not all horse carriage manufacturers successfully transitioned to a new business model. Some will have a hard time. Some will do as well as they did before, and some will do better than they did before.

But all of them need to understand that the key issue is not the price. It’s one piece of the puzzle; but there is also ease of use, the quality of the user experience, availability, the time it takes to do something. In the end, free is price like any other; every day I get free newspapers, handed to me by a boy on the corner. Obviously, it pays off to do that, otherwise that company wouldn’t give them for free. I don’t get cars for free, though: the fact that I drive a Ford, and thus advertise it to the world, is not valuable enough to Ford to give me the car for free. But if I were a very popular actor, they’d be very glad to give me the car for free. How did these companies learn what works and what doesn’t? They experimented, they tried different things, and those who were good at predicting what works, survived. I don’t see why, when it comes to digital content, this should be any different.