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(Actually, if that\'s the case, I\'m delighted on Cory\'s behalf, since that means that you have also paid him for these thoughts. We still know how to pay creators directly for the works they embed in stuff.)

But the chances are excellent that you\'re reading these liquid words as bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken advantage of his willingness to let you have them in that form for free. In such an instance, what \"contains\" them? Your hard disk? His? The Internet and all the servers and routers in whose caches the ghosts of their passage might still remain? Your mind? Cory\'s?

To me, it doesn\'t matter. Even if you\'re reading this from a book, I\'m still not convinced that what you have in your hands is its container, or that, even if we agreed on that point, that a little ink in the shape of, say, the visual pattern you\'re trained to interpret as meaning \"a little ink\" in whatever font the publisher chooses, is not, as Magritte would remind us, the same thing as a little ink, even though it is. 

Meaning is the issue. If you couldn\'t read English, this whole book would obviously contain nothing as far as you were concerned. Given that Cory is really cool and interesting, you might be motivated to learn English so that you could read this book, but even then it wouldn\'t be a container so much as a conduit. 

The real \"container\" would be process of thought that began when I compressed my notion of what is meant by the word \"ink\" - which, when it comes to the substances that can be used to make marks on paper, is rather more variable than you might think - and would kind of end when you decompressed it in your own mind as whatever you think it is.

I know this is getting a bit discursive, but I do have a point. Let me just make it so we can move on.

 I believe, as I\'ve stated before, that information is simultaneously a relationship, an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn\'t is a noun.

Information is not a thing. It isn\'t an object. It isn\'t something that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn\'t have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I\'m presently in the market, and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it\'s been dropped - to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on the Web.

Such economic clarity could not be established for anything \"in\" this book, which you either obtained for free or for whatever price the publisher eventually puts on it. If it\'s a book you\'re reading from, then presumably Cory will get paid some percentage of whatever you, or the person who gave it to you, paid for it. 

But I won\'t. I\'m not getting paid to write this forward, neither in royalties nor upfront. I am, however, getting some intangible value, as one generally does whenever he does a favor for a friend. For me, the value being retrieved from going to the trouble of writing these words is not so different from the value you retrieve from reading them. We are both mining a deeply intangible \"good,\" which lies in interacting with The Mind of Cory Doctorow. I mention this because it demonstrates the immeasurable role of relationship as the driving force in an information economy.

But neither am I creating content at the moment nor are you \"consuming\" it (since, unlike a hamburger, these words will remain after you\'re done with them, and, also unlike a hamburger you won\'t subsequently, well never mind.) Unlike real content, like the stuff in a shipping container, these words have neither grams nor liters by which one might measure their value. Unlike gasoline, ten bucks worth of this stuff will get some people a lot further than others, depending on their interest and my eloquence,
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