I just stumbled over a nice piece Cory Doctorow wrote for Information Week:
The United States traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The United States bet wrong.An “information economy” can’t be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information. The information economy is about selling everything except information.
But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the United States doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how U.S. foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check.
It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once information is in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects.
As much as I agree there’s one point where he’s wrong: it’s not just the United States being on the wrong track here. As a matter of fact, this seems to be true for all “modern” countries with a reasonably high usage of information technology (which is not neccessarily limited or related to Internet usage).
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