Global Content

An information economy is an economy with an increased emphasis on informational activities and information industry. As we’ve made the transition to an information economy, globalisation has created flows of information that are very difficult to control. Cory Doctorow states, “The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world’s government. For decades now, they have been creating policies to “protect” information – stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treating to protect anti-copying technology.”

In this digital era the Internet has no boundaries and it seems uncontrollable to stop people accessing information they aren’t necessarily allowed to. This is a problem for some countries as certain information on the Internet is illegal; however in other countries it is legal. For example Cory Doctorow states “The WTO is rattling its savers at China today, demanding that they figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at Bruce Willis movies without permission – but the Chinese government can’t even figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at seditious revolutionary tracts online.” So how are we to control this problem? In my point of view, we can’t. Regardless of whether information is illegal or legal, people are going to get access to it; the internet has become such a powerful tool and hundreds of millions of people are surfing the web each and every minute of the day. I don’t believe there is a solution to preventing people finding what they’re searching for; it has become too global to handle.

The Internet has also been the cause of the rising debate on whether individuals should have the right of freedom to information and the commercial interests behind the copyright legislation. This is mostly due to the fact that Cory Doctorow states “Every time a PC is connected to the internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public Internet.”

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/sep/18/informationeconomy

https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=information+economy+definition