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OCR for page 121
PROPERTY R1GlITS IN INFORMATION
121
Comments
JORDAN J. BARUCH
Jordan Baruch Associates
What a joy it is for an engineer to have the last word after a lawyer! In this
case, however, that joy is tempered by awe at Anne Branscomb~s thorough
and scholarly treatment of the 10 fundamental rights she associates with
information. Hesitantly, I would like to add an eleventh right that also merits
our concern even if it is not clearly a property right. I shall call it the right to
aggregate and act upon information.
When John Mayo talked about the growing number of elements on a chip,
he neglected to mention that the power of a chip is not linearly related to the
number of those elements. That is an important characteristic of information
as well. In information, when we have one piece of information it may be
worth but little. A second piece that adds to the picture makes the total value
greater, and the third piece, even greater. Indeed, the last keystone bit of
information often increases the value enormously. In other words, if we were
to plot the value of an information collection against the number of pieces of
information in the collection we would often find a curve that grew more than
linearly. In information collection, the whole is truly greater than the simple
sum of the parts. Information becomes more powerful as we aggregate it, and
the authors of these papers recognize that power of aggregation. Certainly
Melvin Kranzberg spoke about the aggregation of knowledge in connection
with the formation of Gutenberg's printing press.
I would like to point out that since the value of information is nonlinear,
many of the things being discussed here get rather fuzzy and much more
complicated. For example, bits and pieces of information about a commercial
company may have little value taken independently; but when they are
aggregated by somebody smart enough to put them together they become very
important and very valuable. How do we protect the property value in the
aggregate of a collection where the individual elements may each belong to
others and have little value in themselves? If, in fact, we watch a smart friend
use his computer in this process, what do we see? First of all, he gets his
information from a large number of places through a little digital window. He
knows tools to put those pieces together and draw conclusions. He builds
models, examines those models, and tries to predict the near-term future.
Information aggregation, model, and prediction all fuse to become a new piece
of information. Its primary protection, because it is likely to be evanescent,
rests with the subsequent action that it triggers. If our smart friend works
well, he will prosper by acting and by protecting the value in the model
whereby he acts on information aggregates.
Mel Kranzberg took the liberty of giving us Kranzberg's First Law. I would
like to suggest two other laws that have a bearing on the information era
because of the nonlinearity of information. First, power in a society will reside
OCR for page 122
122
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with those capable of imparting to a body of information the largest coefficient
of nonlinearity—those who can take 3 things and get 12 or 17 or 93. These
people—the manipulators and concluders rather than the owners will have
enormous influence. The second law, related to the first, may make Harlan
Cleveland unhappy. In the first law I tried to state what would determine
power in our society, namely, the ability to produce a large coefficient of
nonlinearity. The second law simply says that whatever detainee power in
our society will be found to be nonuniformly distributed and therefore unfair.
Some people in our society are simply going to be better at aggregating
information and at drawing conclusions from it than others, and they will be
considered to be taking unfair advantage of the new society just as those who
were strong unfairly took advantage of neolithic society and those who had
early access unfairly took advantage of colonial society. Whatever determines
power will be nonuniformly distributed, and the haves will be looked at as
unfair by the have-nots; I am afraid that will be as much a state of the
information society as it was of the neolithic.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
information collection
