Alexandre de Ridder sends along a couple of links. The first is a speech by Eben Moglen Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture. The second is a piece called The Absurdity of Copyright by a fellow named Dr.Godfried-Willem RAES. Now the interesting thing is that while both agree (as do I) that copyright is an absurdity - I think that the Free Software people have it right, and I'm less sure about Dr. Raes...let me quote the part that makes me doubtful. Dr. Raes starts from the following thought:

Information cannot be possessed. It is not property since it cannot be taken away. It is object nor energy, but essentially form.

I don't really want to debate that point; it is true or false depending on what you mean about information. Specifically: it seems to be true of information in the abstract, but not in the concrete. That is, the statement would seem to be true of the fundamental theorem of calculus - and equally false when applied to any specific copy of the fundamental theorem of calculus (embodied in a book, in the head of a specific person, etc.) My point is simply that abstract information is irrelevant - and copies of ideas are pretty ordinary as economic commodities go, subject to quite ordinary profit and loss calculations. And here is where I think the Free Software people have the key point - in the ordinary profit and loss calculation, copies probably aren't that valuable, and in the future it will be the market for services that counts.

David,

I agree with this point, but I would add one about information made by John Perry Barlow, namely that it is also a subjective experience by an evaluating mind. Two people can look at the same "objective" information and use it in different ways and come to entirely different, and indeed incompatible, conclusions about it. I need to brush up on my British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), but I think they made essentially this point too.