Solveig quoted David Schmidz on scarcity and property rights, on the Technology Liberation Front, and a commenter noted: "So the key question is, then: are ideas scarce? I would argue that they are not, in fact, that it is impossible for them to be scarce."

I think this misses two important dimensions of the issue. First, the time and energy of innovators is most certainly a scarce resource. Second, it is vitrually impossible to tell in advance who is going to be an effective innovator and who is not, so rewarding for success is a sensible policy.

posted by James DeLong @ 7:00 AM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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