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take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. 
 
But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn\'t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US 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\'ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it\'s 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. 
 
But there is an information economy. You don\'t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn\'t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. 
 
Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend\'s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend\'s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. 
 
This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. 
 
And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying -- no matter what that does to productivity -- they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by \"copy protection,\" they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. 
 
The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. 
 
What country do you want to live in?  
 
$$$$ 
 
Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? 
 
(Originally published in InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) 
 
Hollywood loves sequels -- they\'re generally a safe bet, provided that you\'re continuing an already successful franchise. But you\'d have to be nuts to shoot a sequel to a disastrous flop -- say, The Adventures of Pluto Nash or Town and Country. 
 
As disastrous as Pluto Nash was, it was practically painless when compared to the Napster debacle. That shipwreck took place six years ago, when the record industry succeeded in shutting down the pioneering file-sharing service, and they show no signs of recovery. 
 
*The disastrous thing about Napster wasn\'t that it it existed, but rather that the record industry managed to kill it.* 
 
Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital, start charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses to their works. Yes, they kicked this plan off without getting permission from the record companies, but that\'s not so unusual. The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred years ago, when they started
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