Intellectual Property Considerations
One of the central paradoxes of the information society is that it makes information easily reproducible, leading to a variety of freedom/control problems relating to intellectual property. Essentially, business and capital, whose place becomes that of producing and selling information and knowledge, seems to require control over this new resource so that it can effectively be managed and sold as the basis of the information economy. However, such control can prove to be both technically and socially problematic. Technically because copy protection is often easily circumvented and socially rejected because the users and citizens of the information society can prove to be unwilling to accept such absolute commodification of the facts and information that compose their environment.
Responses to this concern range from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States (and similar legislation elsewhere) which make copy protection (see DRM) circumvention illegal, to the free software, open source and copyleft movements, which seek to encourage and disseminate the "freedom" of various information products (traditionally both as in "gratis" or free of cost, and liberty, as in freedom to use, explore and share).
Caveat: Information society is often used by politicians meaning something like "we all do internet now"; the sociological term information society (or informational society) has some deeper implications about change of societal structure.
Read more about this topic: Information Society
Famous quotes containing the words intellectual and/or property:
“Helping children at a level of genuine intellectual inquiry takes imagination on the part of the adult. Even more, it takes the courage to become a resource in unfamiliar areas of knowledge and in ones for which one has no taste. But parents, no less than teachers, must respect a child’s mind and not exploit it for their own vanity or ambition, or to soothe their own anxiety.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“You and I ... are convinced of the fact that if our Government in Washington and in a majority of the States should revert to the control of those who frankly put property ahead of human beings instead of working for human beings under a system of government which recognizes property, the nation as a whole would again be in a bad situation.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)