In law, information, such as product designs, best sellers and computer programs, is classed as intellectual property.
It requires effort and expense to produce, and has value because copies of it can be sold.
The courts recognize the rights of ownership and are prepared to protect them. But information is different from, say, capital equipment because a particular machine can only manifest itself once, and copies are almost as difficult to make as the original, whereas a software program or a novel can be reproduced easily, million as of times if necessary.
In fact the marginal cost of providing one extra copy of an information product across the internet to a customer is actually close to zero.
Information can be categorized according to its market value. Broadly there are three types of information:
- Information for sale, such as software that can be used, or news that informs or a video or novel that entertains. This is usually privately owned, and access to it is sold by the owner at the market price. Often it has a limited shelf-life its value declining with time.
- Information for free,, such as train and passenger jet timetables’, provided by the owners, because it is in their interest to do so. Other examples are advertisement, product prices and specification. Users, though, will often choose to pay for easy access via cell phones, the internet and specialist magazines.
- Information for internal use by organization, such as customer data, work schedules, sales forecast, budgets and minutes of meetings. It is difficult to value, as there is no legal market. However, the cost of losing it through fire or computer catastrophe can be fatal: most companies never recover from a major loss, and close within two years.
