The rapid-fire, uncontrollable exchange of digital information - text files (including books), software, full-length feature films, pornography, video games - is quickly eroding copyright laws, licensing systems, distribution systems, pricing schemes and the other trappings of intellectual property management that our society has carefully tended for the last two centuries. Simultaneously, our ideas about ownership, authorship and the creative process are changing dramatically.
But this "crisis" in the handling of intellectual property isn't the whole story. Increasingly, people are coming to the conclusion that the death of intellectual property as we know it is a good and laudable turn of events, that software and other types of intellectual property should be free - free as in "speech," free as in "beer," and sometimes free as in speech and beer.
