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While we were waiting for the Internet to
make us rich -- back when we thought all we had to do was
to buy lottery tickets called dotcom shares -- we missed
the real story of the information economy. That story, says
Bruce Abramson in Digital Phoenix, took place at
the intersection of technology, law, and economics. It unfolded
through Microsoft's manipulation of software markets, through
open-source projects like Linux, and through the file-sharing
adventures that Napster enabled. Linux and Napster in particular
exploited newly enabled business models to make information
sharing cheap and easy; both systems met strong opposition
from entrenched interests intent on preserving their own
profits. These scenarios set the stage for the future of
the information economy, a future in which each new technology
will threaten powerful incumbents -- who will, in turn,
fight to retard this "dangerous new direction"
of progress.
Disentangling the technological, legal,
and economic threads of the story, Abramson argues that
the key to the entire information economy -- understanding
the past and preparing for the future -- lies in our approach
to intellectual property and idea markets. The critical
challenge of the information age, he says, is to motivate
the creation and dissemination of ideas. After discussing
relevant issues in intellectual property and antitrust law,
the economics of competition, and artificial intelligence
and software engineering, Abramson tells the information
economy's formative histories: the Microsoft antitrust trial,
the open-source movement, and (in a chapter called "The
Computer Ate My Industry") the advent of digital music.
Finally, he looks toward the future, examining some ways
that intellectual-property reform could power economic growth
and showing how the information economy will reshape the
ways we think about business, employment, society, and public
policy -- how the information economy, in fact, can make
us all rich, as consumers and producers, if not as investors.
Bruce Abramson received a Ph.D. in computer
science from Columbia University and a law degree from the
Georgetown University Law Center. He has held positions
with the faculties of the University of Southern California
and Carnegie Mellon. His consulting and legal practice,
based in Washington, D.C., focuses on issues related to
the digital economy.
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