Great! I can download The Wire for free. Smirk!

If you want to read this blog it’s going to cost you.

Well, it will one day. Possibly. It depends in part on what Rupert Murdoch thinks.

As one of the most powerful figures in the world’s media, what Rupert does tends to have a knock-on effect on everybody else.

And he is considering charging for his websites, saying that the current system of giving content away for free is “malfunctioning”.

The trouble is we like getting things for free, and as the internet has developed over the past decade we have come to take for granted the fact that we can watch films, get music, download programmes and read the news without paying a penny.

In the case of music, film and computer games, there are young people out there – “the kids”, I think they’re called – who would never dream of paying. It’s easy to do it legally – and who could honestly begrudge paying around 65p for a song on a legal download site? – but it’s as easy to do it illegally on a file-sharing website.

Even without using a file-sharing website it’s easy to copy music. Simply borrow a CD, put in in your computer and you can save it to your music collection, put it on your mp3 player, burn as many copies as you like or email songs to friends.

This is not at all like it was in the days of home taping. Instead of a hissy, inferior copy taken off the radio on a Sunday night and ruined by Gary-ruddy-Davies’s poptastic whitterings over the intro, these days it’s genuinely difficult to separate the real thing from the imitation.

So, it’s free content for you and your friends and another sale lost to the music business, hurting both jobs and profits.

This week the BBC reported that an alliance of UK creative industries has called for internet service providers to cut off those who repeatedly share illegal content.

The alliance claims that more than half of internet traffic is sharing illegal content. According to its figures there were more than 98 million illegal film downloads in 2007 and more than a billion music downloads.

Some people argue that “if they brought their prices down I wouldn’t resort to piracy” – but in these days of cheap internet shopping and supermarket loss-leaders, that argument doesn’t really hold a lot of water.

Across the channel, our French cousins are taking action. A three-strikes-and-you-are-out bill has just cleared the National Assembly. If it becomes law, anyone caught committing internet piracy three times will be disconnected. Difficult to enforce, obviously, but is it a step in the right direction?

Then there’s the news issue. To write this article I looked at Sunday’s edition of The Observer and the BBC website. Now, do I need to buy the newspaper if the Beeb is giving it away? (Well, I did buy the TV licence, so I suppose I have paid for it, but you see my point.)

There is an argument from some quarters for a system of micropayments. This would involve paying a very small amount to look at a website – say a couple of pence per page. The trouble is, nobody has yet worked out a viable system for doing this.

Then there is the argument that charging even small amounts will hit web traffic, and this will put off advertisers.

And, even if a pay-as-you-view system was introduced, what’s to stop someone lifting the content and making it available for free?

The various implications of charging for internet content quite makes the brain ache after a while. Poor old Rupert must have a headache-and-a-half as he weighs up his options.

But, it’s probably fair to say that change is on the way. Keep your eye on the internet over the next couple of years to see what happens – although you may need to have your credit card to hand.

By Andrew Owen