Cultural Brevity Quote

John Perry Barlow's classic piece on intellectual property in the digital age provides this nice thought on information:

"Information Is Perishable.

With the exception of the rare classic, most information is like farm produce. Its quality degrades rapidly both over time and in distance from the source of production. But even here, value is highly subjective and conditional. Yesterday's papers are quite valuable to the historian. In fact, the older they are, the more valuable they become. On the other hand, a commodities broker might consider news of an event that occurred more than an hour ago to have lost any relevance."

See my previous post on cultural brevity.