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and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead
of buy.” But every time a PC is connected to the Internet and
its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate
Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from
the Internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information
economy can choose to access any data, without having to break
the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked
copy on the public Internet. If there’s one thing we can be sure of,
it’s that an information economy will increase the technological
literacy of its participants.
As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, behind
the Great Firewall of China. Theoretically, I can’t access blogging
services that carry negative accounts of Beijing’s doings, like
WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal, nor the image-sharing site
Flickr, nor Wikipedia. The (theoretically) omnipotent bureaucrats
of the local Minitrue have deployed their finest engineering talent
to stop me. Well, these cats may be able to order political pris-
oners executed and their organs harvested for Party members,
but they’ve totally failed to keep Chinese people (and big-nose
tourists like me) off the world’s Internet. The WTO is rattling its
sabers at China today, demanding that they figure out how to
stop Chinese people from looking at Bruce Willis movies without
permission — but the Chinese government can’t even figure out
how to stop Chinese people from looking at seditious revolution-
ary tracts online.
And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology, and
the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of informa-
tion off the Internet is like getting food coloring out of a swim-
ming pool. Good luck with that.
To see the evidence of the real information economy, look to
all the economic activity that the Internet enables — not the stuff
that it impedes. All the commerce conducted by salarymen who
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