teaching. My bachelor's degree is in writing (technical writing, to be precise), and I am working on a master's degree in the same field--so why don't I act the way that you would expect a writer to act? Why should I toss away control over my own work with such apparent recklessness? The simplest answer is this: I don't think that I actually have any control in the first place. Any person with a cheap personal computer, a cheap Internet connection, and extremely cheap software has the ability to take anything that can be seen or heard, modify it in any way they choose, make unlimited numbers of copies, and send those copies anywhere in the world. If one reads the previous sentence carefully, one can find details to quibble over; but the proof of its basic truth stands in front of millions of people every time that they turn their computers on, whether these people notice it or not. I see the obviousness of it every day that I use a computer, which is practically every day. It is my inability to ignore this reality which has finally driven me to abandon the idea of intellectual property for my own "creations" and to write this paper. One of my favorite descriptions of the situation comes from an article by journalist Charles Mann in the September 1998 issue of Atlantic Monthly: The transformation of intellectual property into electronic form creates new problems. If the cost of manufacturing and distributing a product falls, economic forces will drive down its price, too. The Net embodies this principle to an extreme degree. Manufacturing and distribution costs collapse almost to nothing online: zeroes and ones can be shot around the world with a few clicks of a mouse. Hence producers of digital texts, music, and films will have trouble charging anything at all for copies of their works--competitors can always offer substitutes for less, pushing the price toward the vanishing point. . . . Even as digital technology drives the potential v...
