Wow, Obvious.
Information is a funny thing. Information is owned in our culture. Just what is information, and in what ways can someone controll it?
I have been reading the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, an authority on the topic of intelectual property. This book is interesting in the fact that it is well written, informative, insightful, and is distributed freely through a creative commons liscence. This book is seriously free to download and read freely as long as you do not use the work for any commercial gain, and always attribute the work to the author.
This system of retaining rights to information while still encouraging free use of the material is a transitionary step from the heavily regulated culture that we have right now to the open and free culutre that the Academics of the Internet tout. US culture, and more specifically, the legal system has grabbed ahold of the idea that all information should be owned and that any use of information without express permission from the �owner� is a violation of the information owners rights. Indeed, this book really opened my eyes to the deeper issue that so many people are not seeing in the entire piracy debate. The problem extends beyond the sharing of music files over a network. The problem lies in the fact that all information is owned in our society and that the owners of that material have the power to enforce their commercial desires upon the public through the government, even if it is not in the best interest of the public.
There is little doubt in my mind that the dinosaurs of the recording and motion picture industries will die off or be radically changed in the decades to come. Despite their best efforts to hold down the information revolution�s inevitable result, there will come a day when these corporations will not dictate so strongly what a consumer can and cannot do with digital information.
I hope to be able to express my thoughts on this matter more clearly after I finish reading the book. Until then I will just say that the freedom of information on the internet may be the single greatest driving force in social chane during the coming century, IMHO. 