But I’m not sure I completely agree, either. The music part I do agree with more, as their work is original, while ESPN and Keith Law rely on their greater means to be able to go out and see people as an excuse to make people pay for it. If they made that platform completely funded by advertising sales, there’s a great chance it could equalize it. SBNation makes a good amount of money that way. But because ESPN has the original means to send someone out there to scout or talk to industry insiders, we are forced to pay. I disagree with their philosophy in that way, as that information could easily be free if someone went out and got it, since a player’s actions are public. Writers such as Keith Law, while they might have some original insights, are not working with completely original material. Law doesn’t need to go find who this person named Strasburg is to know that he’s the best draft prospect this year. It’s more of the same that allows ESPN to force people to pay to find out how a player did and how good he is. And that’s no criticism of Law. I’m sure if you asked him whether he’d prefer his info to be free or paid, he’d probably say free, providing that his paycheck is the same. Places like ESPN and BA will realize within the next decade that proving free information is the most powerful economic tool out there for bringing in advertisers, and I’m guessing that with a slow, steady transition to that format, the company could be more profitable in the long-run. With blogs and such gaining so much popularity, people are offering the same sort of information completely for free, and once that reaches something like the MLB Draft, BA and ESPN will have to change or be left behind. Newspapers are figuring this out the hard way. The pay wall sites will be next. It’s pretty much a certainty.

That being said, yeah, don’t break laws copying things that should be paid for. If they want to protect their information with a pay wall, so be it. I prefer to pay for it until better free stuff comes along, and at that point I’ll write a nice letter saying that their service is obsolete. Even if those sites want to collect money, it’d be a great thing if they went to a donation format. Numerous people that write independently do that, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a core group of scouting personnel do that in a collaborative site somewhat soon. Complaining about a pay wall doesn’t do any good, but finding alternative means to collect that same information independently and publishing it for free is powerful.