I gladly pay for quality media at a fair price.<p>Netflix, to me, is fairly priced. A cable subscription sure as hell is not. $15/month for a digital copy of the NYT? No thanks, the 99c/month for the first month I'd agree with. The NYT is a premium news outlet and blog, not a publication you get delivered to your door in hard-copy. I get AJE for free.<p>It's not that we're mooching, it's that the digitization of content removes most of the cost of its production and delivery.<p>Newspapers, movie studios, cable providers, etc. are all being disrupted, and refuse to realize that the value of their services has changed. Deal with it. Industries fluctuate. Please don't harm the customer because of it.
See, I don't necessarily think your generation (or any generation) has to pay. What they DO have to be willing to do is to share their expertise and talents as well. If everybody is willing to contribute free content as well as consume it, we'll be just fine.
I prefer to look at it from a sociological standpoint. Sociological research shows that compensating content production is based on <i>merit</i>, not markets, in younger people. You're not going to convince a "20-something" to pay for something that they don't consider worth paying for, especially since they have more information than ever to help them inform their purchases.<p>If you want younger people to pay for content, you're going to have to convince them that their money is going to compensate the artists that are responsible for creating the works and not anybody who did not contribute. (I do mean "convince;" research showed that propaganda campaigns along this tack were successful in converting young pirates, regardless of veracity.)