| > Information doesn't have autonomy so needs to be created, it can have time value, it certainly has relevance value, or entertainment value, has quality value (signal > noise); The point is that information per se is non-rival and non-scarce, so the normal drivers of market exchange don't apply to it. Since we want to incentivize the creation of information, we have created positive law that generates artificial scarcity, and allows market forces to work mostly as they would for physical goods, but this is just a stopgap solution due to the difficulty of commoditizing the downstream uses of information. To echo another commenter in this thread, if we were better at commoditizing and marketing the uses of information directly, rather than the information itself, we wouldn't need to use artificial scarcity as a proxy to generate that incentive. > all these things require effort to produce, maintain, curate, distribute. But these inputs are not the determinant of the value of the end product. They only describe the process of creating it, but value is determined by the subjective utility enjoyed by the end consumer. If you view time and effort necessary to create and distribute information as a capital expenditure on par with the time and effort necessary to design and manufacture any physical good, perhaps things come into clearer relief. Is anyone entitled to a guaranteed return on capital investments, or are they bearing risk in making them in pursuit of a potential, but uncertain, return? I think most people would hold the latter view. > Leaving the practical constraints behind, I also struggle to see moral or ethical reasons for information to be free. I'm not sure I see where moral or ethical considerations even come into the discussion. The closest moral consideration that applies to the question is the way it affects property rights, but in that regard, it seems that it's the artificial scarcity in information that seems to lack sufficient moral justification. There are no natural property rights in information itself, due to its conceptual and non-rival nature, and the attempt to take the norms of ownership associated with natural property and apply them to information actually constitutes an abridgment of natural property rights: functionally, 'intellectual property' amounts to a restriction on what patterns other people may arrange their own physical materials into, based on fallaciously reifying the pattern itself into a putative concrete thing to which rivalry applies. |