“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson declared. As the Internet is destroying the business model that has historically supported high-quality journalism, movies, music and television, the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that Johnson was wrong. “Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower,” technology activists have insisted, selectively quoting the technology thinker Stewart Brand. (In fact, Brand said in the same 1984 speech that on the other hand, “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.”) According to the worldview embodied by Google and Facebook and many of the best minds in the legal academy and public-­interest community, the culture business is collapsing because the old-style media executives who run Hollywood, cable television, the record companies and newspapers have failed to adjust to the expectations of a demanding new generation of media consumers who want free movies and books and music and news wherever and whenever they’re online.

In “Free Ride,” a book that should change the debate about the future of culture, Robert Levine argues, in effect, that Samuel Johnson was right, and that it’s the self-interested Silicon Valley technology companies and their well-financed advocates who are wrong. “The real conflict online,” Levine writes, “is between the media companies that fund much of the entertainment we read, see and hear and the technology firms that want to distribute their content — legally or otherwise.” By delivering content they don’t pay for, or selling content far below the price it cost to create, Levine says, information and entertainment distributors like YouTube and The Huffington Post become “parasites” on the media companies that invest substantially in journalists, musicians and actors; the distributors drive down prices in a way that sucks the economic lifeblood out of those who create and finance the best achievements of our culture. The result is a “digital version of Wal-Mart capitalism,” in which free-riding distributors reap all the economic benefits of the Internet by cutting prices, and culture suppliers are forced to cut costs in response. This dynamic, Levine argues, destroys the economic incentive to create the kinds of movies, television, music and journalism consumers demand, and for which they are, in fact, quite willing to pay.

Levine’s story begins as a struggle over copyright. He interviews Bruce Lehman, a former Clinton official who championed the policies that led to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lehman says the 1998 law was supposed to balance the interests of tech companies with those of artists and media companies. He now expresses regret that it has had the unintended consequence of making the fortunes of tech companies while devastating artists and media companies. The law allows distributors like YouTube to profit from pirated movies and video as long as they remove the illegal content when asked by those whose rights have been violated. As a result of this arrangement, YouTube’s own employees were convinced that more than three-quarters of viewing hits in the site’s early days derived from copyrighted video, according to e-mail disclosed in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, vigorously denies wrongdoing, but in the wake of the lawsuit, YouTube now takes voluntary steps to filter out copyright-­infringing content — a solution that the studios, according to Levine, view as imperfect but an improvement.

Levine is not a pro-copyright ideologue: he acknowledges the many good reasons to reform copyright, including the fact that the copyrights’ terms are too long and the financial penalties for infringement can be too high. But the biggest problem with copyright today, he says, is that its protections have become illusory in an age when movies and music, produced by independent artists and big studios alike, are available on pirate sites even before they’re released. Because copyright laws are so difficult to enforce, media companies have little leverage when negotiating financial terms with distributors. And so, they’re virtually forced to give their stuff away. That’s what happened with the music industry, which, spooked by the proliferation of pirated file sharing on Napster, struck a bad deal with iTunes that allowed Apple to replace the sale of $15 albums with 99-cent songs. “Even if they continue to grow,” Levine writes, “those 99-cent-song sales won’t come close to making up for the corresponding decline in CD sales.” (Apple can afford to sell content so cheaply because its low-cost music helps to promote more profitable products — in this case, the iPod.) Even with the growth in online audiences, recorded music in the United States was worth $6.3 billion in sales in 2009, less than half its value a decade earlier.