People, bits, and atoms
So (as they say in cybercircles) I've been working on some new ideas. The Cigarettes and Copyrights article is gaining flesh (”don't let the broadcast flag go through, because the FCC has exceeded its jurisdiction and is making copyright policy”). Now I'm working on a new project.
The main idea here is that we take lazy shortcuts in reifying information. We use property concepts (”trespass to chattels”) in talking about automatic searching of information that will do nothing other than lower costs. We confuse objects with information when we talk about whether people have rights to access content stored in a particular format (”you can watch that DVD and take notes; you don't have a right to manipulate that content when it's in DVD form”). Software is a hard case, and sometimes it's not clear whether it is speech (bits) or action (atoms).
But these lazy shortcuts are ultimately quite destructive. After all, law is about people. Law is supposed to serve people. So we should serve core human values in developing legal frameworks. People progress through acquiring (participating in, creating) metainformational depth. That's what maturing and learning is; that's what a cultural conversation is.
What's interesting and different about information (as opposed to clods of dirt) is that it interacts and amplifies in ways that dirt doesn't. It's not just that information isn't scarce — although that's a difference too. That difference isn't as fundamental, though. It's that information isn't conserved and interacts with other information in ways that create (taa-dah) metainformational depth. Dirt can't do this.
So, any time we unnecessarily reify information, or drag in bodies of assumptions that are based on objects, we're cutting ourselves off from basic human interests in metainformational interesting-ness. We don't even know what we're missing. But it's very likely that more complex and interesting clumping is being truncated. Without that clumping, we can't learn.
We need to have different (more sensitive, more freeing) regimes for information than we do for real property, and we need to be careful about lazy theoretical shortcuts that don't do us any favors. Pieces of dirt can't talk, so they're fine under real property law. But as humans we need to be careful not to cut off our own conversations.