Barlow

In his Wired article, John Perry Barlow provides a fantastic comparison between understanding light in more than one way and understanding information in such a manner.  Just as light is understood as both a wave and a particle, information must be understood as an activity, a life form, and a relationship – and only by understanding this can one understand why information should not be chained down through burdensome intellectual property rights.  Throughout his description, I really found Barlow’s statement of, “Information is a verb, not a noun,” to be the most powerful, since that in itself could shoot down any argument that it deserves any ounce of intellectual property rights.  He writes, “Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods. It is the pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer.”  For me, it’s a novel way of perceiving information, yet it makes more sense than seeing it as a “thing.”