“The Economy of Ideas: Selling Wine Without Bottles on the Global Internet” — A Reader’s Response:
“The Economy of Ideas: Selling Wine Without Bottles on the Global Internet (Perry Barlow, 1992) is a discussion about how “digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane where property law of all sorts has found definition.” Perry Barlow claims that “to assume that systems of law based in the physical world will serve in an environment that is as fundamentally different as Cyberspace is a folly.” Such a claim is evident with the development and expansion of a “parallel economy” where our ideas are being protected as they are distributed into the marketplace instead of litigation. As more information is entering into Cyberspace, our digitized expressions of intellectual protection has to adapt to changing circumstances. In order to understand Perry Barlows’s premise, the reader needs to be familiar with what is information and its basic behaviors.
Our thoughts are too abstract to have a formal definition. This is why Perry Barlow chooses to explain information in terms of its properties. According to him, information is “an activity, a life form and a relationship.” Additionally, the complex nature of our thoughts is rendered paradoxical. To further explain his rationale, Perry Barlow critiques his argument by taking an in-depth look at the “essential characteristics” of information. He concludes that information is experienced not an intangible retention of knowledge — it must be constantly evolving and its meaning has unique value.
As technology continues to change, so must our expectations for intellectual property protection as there is an ever increasingly shift in the “purposes and methods of law.” Information continues to grow as a “dominant form of human trade” and becomes important to our understanding of the possibilities of the digital realm. Perry Barlow suggests that “the future protection of your intellectual property will depend on your ability to control the your relationship to the market.” Our relationship with information will change so that it is continuous, no longer sequential. This is in conjunction to the “value of that relationship will reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its relevance to your market and, underlying everything, the ability of that market to access your creative services swiftly, conveniently and interactively.” As individuals continue to move towards getting their information from “its point of production” interactivity will become a “billable commodity without authorship.” In other words, it is essential for our intellectual property protections to be based on ethics and technology rather than on law. Perry Barlow suggests that encryption will be the saving grace for our “crisis in intellectual property.”
Perry Barlow’s assertion about the future of intellectual property protection seems to be quite radical. It’s shocking to discover that our society’s understanding of intellectual property is not correct and must be “unlearned” in order to advance as a society and address conflicting related issues. In perhaps the not so far off distance, will the majority of human exchange be virtual rather than physical as Perry Barlow suggests? Or will we live in a world “made more of verbs than nouns?”
