ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that we need a politics, or perhaps a political economy, of intellectual property. Using the controversy over copyright on the Internet as a case study and the history of the environmental movement as comparison, it offers a couple of modest proposals. Everyone says that the ownership and control of information is one of the most important forms of power in contemporary society. There are two crucial aspects of the current information economy. The first is the increasing homologization of forms of information. The second crucial aspect of information economy is a corollary of the homologization of forms of information—the decreasing proportion of product cost and intellectual attention devoted to medium rather than message. The idea of an information age is a useful and productive concept. The chapter details the homologizing tendency for all "information issues" to collapse into each other as information technology and the very idea of "information" move forward in a reciprocal relationship.
