Here's the simple truth: the business of publishing a magazine, not to mention running a culture, just got horrifically more difficult. The reason Newsweek wants to know the hacker from the hack -- and wants to call the hacker the devil -- lies in the mercurial, unreliable nature of information-as-capital:
...information has special characteristics that distinguish it from all other economic entities. Most notable may be that information can be taken without being lost. By the same token, information may be licensed or leased to a large number of people at the same time without being divided or diminished. This makes intellectual property, or more simply "software," extremely profitable to own -- and therefore very attractive to steal. So information's special nature also makes property law far more critical to information-based businesses, even as it makes enforcement of that law more complicated.-- Lewis J. Perelman, School's Out
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