Barlow, John Perry. “The Economy of Ideas.” Wired 1994. Print.

• Barlow is confronting the problem of digitized property:  “If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it?  How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds?  And, if we can’t get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?”
• Barlow argues that a new set of rules needs to be developed to take into account the digitized object.
• When “word became flesh” is when the problem of “ideas as property” first became an issue.
• The “mental-to-physical” conversion is what make patentability so much easier.
• A transition to the “information economy” is mentioned in this piece: “this comes at a time when the human mind is replacing sunlight and mineral deposits as the principle new source of wealth.”
• Barlow is worried that because ideas – not their physical manifestations – are becoming patented, freedom of speech will suffer from pressure from corporate legal departments.
• Legal jurisdictions are rewritten and become very problematic in this new non-physical situation.
• We may be returning to the “Bad Old Days” of property wherein ownership of anything was procured by those with the most force.  Barlow means that since we are patenting things that are unreal – abstractions, sequences of virtual events, math – there is a chance that those with new force (through litigation) will propertize the abstractions of ideas.
• According to Barlow, laws are supposed to ratify already developed social consensus.  Because the internet is such a new technology, he argues that there is yet to be a social contract that speaks to the experiences of cyberspace.  Therefore, we should wait to do any litigating as of yet.
• There is a fundamental problem between a notion of value based in scarcity (property model) and value based in distribution and dissemination (information model).
• Great piece here about the glacial pace of precedence law (pg. 7).
• Threepart thesis of the piece:  1) Information is an activity; 2) Information is a life form; and 3) Information is a relationship.
• Information is an activity – Because there are no ‘physical’ containers for information, it operates as a verb, not a noun.  Because information takes consciousness to process, it is experienced, not possessed.
• Information is a life form – Information expands whenever possible and replicates itself.  Information wants to change because in digital environments, the closure isn’t possible – information is constantly transforming across space and time.  Information deteriorates when it gets farther from it’s source of production and as it gets older.
• Information is a relationship – There is a consubstantiation to information that requires communication and a relationship to make it relevant.  It takes two interlocutors.  Information is merely data that has found it’s way through a mind and deemed valuable for some reason.  Exposure creates demand – in other words, familiarity has more value than scarcity.
• Time replaces space in the information world.  The closer to the “beginning” of an edit you can get, the more valuable the information is.
• In the section “getting paid in cyberspace” Barlow begins to touch on what is known as gift economies in digital environments.
• Information economics will be based on “relationship more than possession.”  This is the support economy that Zuboff and Maxmin discuss.
• Cryptography is – according to Barlow – the “material” that will make up the net in the future.
• There are early signs of the information economy’s emphasis on subscription based software and services as opposed to static media/utility entities on 18.  Pretty early to forcast the sort of transition that is just now occurring.

• In the absence of the old containers, almost everything we think we know about intellectual property is wrong. We’re going to have to unlearn it. We’re going to have to look at information as though we’d never seen the stuff before.
• The protections that we will develop will rely far more on ethics and technology than on law.
• Encryption will be the technical basis for most intellectual property protection. (And should, for many reasons, be made more widely available.)
• The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential.
• And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.