Greetings Economists,
On Jul 7, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
the whole idea of the "intellectual property rights" movement is to
take information with a zero price and give it a positive price (as
with downloaded music). Morally speaking, that information may have
zero price, but not in the Brave New World.
Doyle;
Capitalist Enterprise have operated about information like this for a
long time. You have to buy a book, or movie on some media. What's
free is the connection to information people make. Connection to
information is not free in an absolute sense. It costs energy and
space to exchange information. But the cost of network properties of
information is no where near what the object cost of a book would be.
One has to have massive databases to make money off the network
properties of information. A small library of a few dozen books has
no great network value. The library of Congress has great value in
the sense of many people reading parts of the library to network out
knowledge.
In order to make a network worth more the cost of objects of
information like a book or movie have to decline. That means instead
of a catalogue of 100,000 movies like netflix, one is really trying to
harness the proliferation of movies on youtube and whatever other
source to grow network value exponentially. Exponential being a
description of network properties of connection. These growths
engender new types of network processes of the objects, like more
prosaic use of motion pictures for daily activity, example being
online maps one can fly over the earth with.
The route one takes to fly over the earth may be related to a persons
particular location, but maps grow and spread to ever more complete
coverage to the planet. This coverage or network structure is the
over all value of the information. The more extensive and varied the
use of the coverage the more valuable, and the less parts of the map
cost.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
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