"It's the end of the world as we know it..."

2008 is shaping up to be an interesting year in terms how society uses industries that rely on Intellectual Property (IP). So far, in just a couple of weeks into the new year, the traditional music recording industry is pretty much dead, the strike by television writers in the U.S. is still going three months later and already causing havoc with tv habits, and Facebook is again causing waves with Hasbro demanding that Facebook remove the Scrabulous application. Further, yesterday Apple's Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to attempt to move into online download-able movies through its ITunes store.

To me this is interesting - what we have here is the degradation of IP. Essentially, with the digitization of information and the means to rapidly obtain (legally or otherwise) free or nearly free copies of this information, the value of the information has plummeted.

What does this mean for the future? Hard to say. In some ways it is hard to feel sympethetic to many of the effected industries - I mean, what really is the "value" of a recording of music that has millions of copies around the world and can be listened to on the radio, in stores, or in someone's home? Value traditionally is derived from scarcity - but how is mass produced media scarce?

Likewise, Hasbro is making a stink about Scrabulous. Is it directly copied from Scrabble? Without a doubt. However, after more than 40 years on the market, sold around the world, is there really justification for holding the protection on a product that is really very basic - marked tiles and a board with squares on it. (Monopoly is worse in my mind - come on - after 70 odd years, shouldn't it be in the public domain?!).

I suspect there is going to be a revolution in the near future for IP - either courts are going to lock it so tight that use for individuals is tightly restricted, or IP will disappear on items that are meant for mass consumption (this doesn't include patents, although I think that will also need to be modified in the near future if patents are to remain relevant). This is pretty much in evidence after the Canadian government backed down from introducing stricter controls over IP in December after a massive protest group sprung up overnight on Facebook.

I think one result out of all of this will be the hardening of protection of information from being released to the public from government and corporate sources. As such, science fiction writers, in particular William Gibson, was prescient about this - information secrecy will be of utmost importance in the near future for things that are to be kept away from the public's eyes.