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about $1.00, using equipment now widely available for PCs and costing only a few hundred dollars.11

Copying information has always been possible, but the advent of digital information brings an extraordinary increase in the amount of information that can be easily and inexpensively reproduced. Given the widespread availability of computers, many people now have the ability to casually reproduce vast amounts of information. Consequently, the traditional physical and economic impediments to copyright infringement have been considerably undermined. Its size once meant that a 30-volume encyclopedia could be reproduced only by those with considerable means and motive; now an encyclopedia on a CD can be reproduced in a few minutes on what is fast becoming ordinary technology.

The character of reproduction has changed as well. Although a photocopy often isn't as sharp as the original,12 a digital copy is indistinguishable from the original as are all successive digital copies. For every form of digital information, every copy is as good as the original and can therefore be the source of additional perfect copies, which greatly reduces what was once a natural impediment to copyright infringement. With the traditional form of information, the successively lower quality of each generation of copy offered a natural limitation to redistribution. With digital information there is no such limitation.

Information in digital form is largely liberated from the medium that carries it. When information is sent across networks, there is no need to ship a physical substrate; the information alone flows to the recipient. The liberation of content is also evident when bits are copied across media (disk to tape to CD to floppy) with the greatest of ease. The choice of media may have consequences for the amount of storage or speed of access, but the content of the information and its properties (e.g., the ability to make exact copies) are preserved perfectly across a variety of media.

Information in traditional analog forms (movies, paintings, sculpture) is, by contrast, far more tightly bound to the underlying physical media.

11Text is a particularly compelling example because it puts, relatively speaking, little information on a page. Graphic images contain far more information: a single 5" x 7" color photograph may require 14 megabytes to store digitally (300 bits per inch resolution and 36 bits of color); hence a CD might hold about 46 such photographs. There are also a variety of ways to compress digital information so that it takes up even less space; sometimes this means being able to fit 30 times more information onto a disk than it could hold without compression.

12The difference between a copy and an original depends of course on the quality of the equipment being used. Audio or video tapes copied using standard (i.e., analog) technology, for example, are markedly inferior in quality to digital copies.