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it’s the iNformatioN ecoNomy, stuPid
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It’s the Information Economy, Stupid
(Originally published as “Free Data Sharing Is Here to Stay,”
The Guardian
,
September 18, 2007.)
Since
the
1970s,
pundits
have
predicted
a
transition
to
an
“information economy.” The vision of an economy based on
information seized the imaginations of the world’s governments.
For decades now, they have been creating policies to “protect”
information — stronger copyright laws, international treaties
on
patents
and
trademarks,
treaties
to
protect
anti-copying
technology.
The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based
on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to
make it harder to get access to information unless you’ve paid for
it. That means that we have to make it harder for you to share
information, even after you’ve paid for it. Without the ability to
fence off your information property, you can’t have an informa-
tion market to fuel the information economy.
But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just
as the industrial economy wasn’t based on making it harder to
get access to machines, the information economy won’t be based
on making it harder to get access to information. Indeed, the op-
posite seems to be true: the more IT we have, the easier it is to
access any given piece of information — for better or for worse.
It used to be that copy-prevention companies’ strategies went
like this: “We’ll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to
make an unauthorized copy of it. That way, only the
über
-nerds
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