Last night, I made chocolate babycakes.

I had seen Nigella Lawson’s recipe in the Times two weeks ago… I even ripped it out. But I lost the clipping and went back online to print out it. Alas, they wanted $3.95 to access it: Two Paths to Glory: Smashing Desserts – Free Preview. (The free preview is a paragraph).

Ever resourceful, I did a google search and found, gasp, 39,000 matches, including the entire recipe.

The key to charging for content is a limited number of channels or a secure "locking"  mechanism. The web offers neither. As people get better at searching (and they do, every day), the chances that you can charge for nuggets of non-custom information go down, relentlessly.

PS I wonder why I don’t feel like I stole the recipe…

…If I hadn’t lost the clipping, I certainly wouldn’t have been stealing. And those 39,000 recipes didn’t all come from Nigella… I wonder where Nigella got her version?