Two Views of Information

The traditional view holds that information or its derivative knowledge is power. Therefore it has value and needs to be protected against loss, corruption and misuse by others. Historically we have protected information because it was scarce or conversely, perhaps scarcity itself was created as a means of increasing value and associated power.

The traditional view, however, is giving way to the modern notion that information actually derives value through use and reuse. This decentralized view holds that substantial community benefit can be realized through the free flow of information from the hands of the few to the hands of the many. The more information is used by the community, the greater the return on the community investment. But who actually owns the information? What is the notion of intellectual property? If I invent a good idea, like the alphabet, should I be allowed to own it - forever? What would the world be like if numbers were intellectual property owned by a corporation, would I go to a distributer and have them fill up my spreadsheet to I can perform the next set of tasks? Consider the american company that received a US Paten on Bismati Rice - ref1, ref2.

In September 1997, a Texas company called RiceTec won a patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,663,484) on "basmati rice lines and grains." The patent secures lines of basmati and basmati-like rice and ways of analyzing that rice. RiceTec, owned by Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein, faced international outrage over allegations of biopiracy. Both voluntarily and due to review decisions by the United States Patent Office, RiceTec has lost most of the claims of the patent, including, most importantly, the right to call their rice lines "basmati." This was a huge victory for India, whose farmers faced enormous economic losses from the patent - source, Wikipedia.

The view that information was the source of some power that can best be handled inside protective vaults or silos could be described as a contributing for vertical organizational designs intended to support differentiation and control balances based on who gets to see and do what with the information. The emerging view that as information becomes more readily available through the creation of horizontal structures like the internet or its variant the intranet, a natural consequence will be the discovery of new opportunities and possibilities. The basic idea is that as more information are given access to access or discover relevant information and the knowledge or literacy levels increase, the organization will be better able to make better plans and decisions. This premise was presented in 1945 by economist Friedrich Hayek in The Use of Knowledge in Society. In it, Hayek proposes that information sharing, which arises when diverse individuals interacting for their own varying goals, results serendipitously in order and universal benefit. He suggested that cooperation is an inevitable outcome of social interaction because of the benefits of distributed knowledge.