Both my sister and her husband are professional journalists at one of Britain's broadsheets and they have a very tough job of it. My sister was a freelance journalist for a couple of years looking for piece after piece before finally getting a job.

We have a lot of discussions about payment for content and how journalists should be compensated for their work and why they deserve to be compensated well.

A professional journalist works very hard indeed, they have to produce content on demand very quickly and to put aside their pride when sub-editors mash and reshape it to what (they believe) the editor asked for. Journalists have to create pieces out of events which are of little or no real interest and to do so without flinching. It's a hard job.

The job of a freelance journalist is just as tough and in some ways even tougher as the majority of it is selling and pitching. I was astonished when my sister told me how often she was sending out pitch ideas to editors and how she would engage multiple editors daily and of course be rejected by most of them. Professional journalists whether freelance or retained earn their keep and the majority of them (certainly the ones who haven't reached the confines of seniority) work extremely hard.

However in all of this there is something that my sister and I disagree on. In fact we've decided not to speak about it much because it's an understandably emotional subject for her and one that I feel very strongly about. And that is the topic of whether someone has a given right to receive compensation for their work.

I find it very difficult to empathise with the sentiment that anyone's work has a god-given value. Software is sometimes valuable in isolation as code, on a disk but most often it's not. Years ago you could produce software and sell it on cassettes, now many of our most successful companies are ones which provide a more scalable, hosted five-nines uptime service for free than many ever even charged for.

It frustrates me that writers should sit down and complain that nobody is prepared to pay them for their work. Many other industrial workers and even knowledge workers have found their skills devalued by the passage of time and have had to deal with it.

Unlike all those other industries which got crushed under the wheels of time though we still fundamentally need writers. We want good writers, we need informed writers and good writing is still not in unlimited supply. The survival skill writers need is not penmanship it's entrepreneurship. This may be unpalatable but it's also unavoidable.