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Information as PropertyInformation has exclusivity value--like a secret. To maintain control, keep your voice down. For the media, this means using secure technologies, not the courts, to maintain ownership. Fresh, relevant, and quality content are, and should be, valuable. Create it and we'll buy it. As information becomes mature, its exclusivity value drops near zero, and it becomes grist for the cultural mill. Information as SpeechInformation is as much like speech as it is like property In the information age, people do not just communicate with words, and the nature of a 'free press' changes. People communicate with data. Words, text, voice, images, audio, source, video. In the Information Age, we will become indistinguishable from the ideas we produce and consume. What happens to the freedom of speech if we can not produce content by assimilating and repurposing content . Information ownership legislates significant commercial control of communication. Laws of Information PropertyWe must find a balance between the extreme of information being speech, and the extreme of information being property. Analogizing information with property fails because information can be copied infinitely. Copyright law has worked so far. It was not designed for the Information Age. Notes on FreedomThe American Constitution grants rights to the freedom of speech. They were made 200 years ago, and were designed to construct a society with new levels of Freedom. Freedoms were not granted for speech that was deemed harmful (like yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theatre). Grafitti is illegal as are Libel and slander, and as they should be. We need laws based on the ethics of information. The BeanBrowserThe Web, Napster, Freenet, Usenet, email, and every Internet means of communication has dramatic implications for Free Speech. The BeanBrowser enables the hosting of information relevant to a person, and her community. If everyone either has a BeanBrowser, or a friend with a BeanServer then universal personal hosting is possible. Using integrated security, content will be "under the radar" of copyright law enforcement. Currently most of the websites are public. The BeanBrowser will address the needs of the "private site". We believe that the architecture, ease of use, and open source code, of the BeanBrowser make it suited for the role of Personal Application Server.
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