What do we mean when we say "information has value" or "information is valuable"?
Information is useful, good, and necessary for decision making and implementing change. It can also be beautiful, inspiring, terrifying, and awesome. We can think of these as intellectual, moral, or artistics value of information.
Information is created, stored, shared, given, sold and bought. often in a "market-place", real or virtual. So, we often talk about "intellectual property" or ask "Whose idea or information is it?". In academic research and in broader society, this raises questions and concerns about ownership, priority, credit, attribution, and plagiarism.
Read these quotations:
"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, "intellectual property", and the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better".
- Stewart Brand. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. New York: Viking, 1987, p. 202. (T171 .M49 B73 1987)
"Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers... And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."
- (c) Ursula K. Leguin. Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, November 19, 2014. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal
.Ask yourself some questions, reflect: