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infringing copies, as spammers do with the text of their messages in order to evade spam filters. 
 
In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach us here. Like copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and more are being created every second. Any company that could identify spam messages -- including permutations and variations on existing spams -- could write its own ticket to untold billions. 
 
Some of the smartest, most dedicated engineers on the planet devote every waking hour to figuring out how to spot spam before it gets delivered. If your inbox is anything like mine, you\'ll agree that the war is far from won. 
 
If the YouTubes of the world are going to prevent infringement, they\'re going to have to accomplish this by hand-inspecting every one of the tens of billions of blog posts, videos, text-files, music files and software uploads made to every single server on the internet. 
 
And not just cursory inspections, either -- these inspections will have to be undertaken by skilled, trained specialists (who\'d better be talented linguists, too -- how many English speakers can spot an infringement in Urdu?). 
 
Such experts don\'t come cheap, which means that you can anticipate a terrible denuding of the fertile jungle of internet hosting companies that are primary means by which tens of millions of creative people share the fruits of their labor with their fans and colleagues. 
 
It would be a great Sovietisation of the world\'s digital printing presses, a contraction of a glorious anarchy of expression into a regimented world of expensive and narrow venues for art. 
 
It would be a death knell for the kind of focused, non-commercial material whose authors couldn\'t fit the bill for a \"managed\" service\'s legion of lawyers, who would be replaced by more of the same -- the kind of lowest common denominator rubbish that fills the cable channels today. 
 
And the worst of it is, we\'re marching toward this \"solution\" in the name of protecting artists. Gee, thanks. 
 
$$$$ 
 
It\'s the Information Economy, Stupid 
 
(Originally published in The Guardian as \"Free data sharing is here to stay,\" September 18, 2007) 
 
Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an \"information economy.\" The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world\'s governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to \"protect\" information -- stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology. 
 
The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you\'ve paid for it. That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you\'ve paid for it. Without the ability to fence off your information property, you can\'t have an information market to fuel the information economy. 
 
But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the industrial economy wasn\'t based on making it harder to get access to machines, the information economy won\'t be based on making it harder to get access to information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: the more IT we have, the easier it is to access any given piece of information -- for better or for worse. 
 
It used to be that copy-prevention companies\' strategies went like this: \"We\'ll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorized copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy.\" But every time a PC is connected to the Internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the Internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any
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