What if no one felt bad for copying someone else’s thought or idea? What if everyone felt free to use any information they found for any reason? Imagine a world in which you could copy one paragraph from one article, add another paragraph from a different article, throw in a few of your own thoughts, and publish the resulting article as your own.

Ownership. Intellectual property. Copyright law. These concepts are important in a digital age, but are they ultimately helping or hurting us? Are they enabling or crippling us? We have so much information at our fingertips. Yet, because this level of access to information is so new and we still think according to old principles of old media, we, collectively, are preventing ourselves, individually, from exploring how the information can be accessed and digested and repurposed for everyone’s benefit.

What if students could hand in research papers with no words of their own? Further, what if nothing was cited? Where did the information come from? Does it matter?

The history and authorship of information is important, since it frames or contextualizes thoughts and ideas. This is especially important with respect to historical analysis and commentary. That said, can we not judge the quality of an idea on its own merits?

For example, say I am writing a research paper on Christopher Columbus and I read in a book that he came to America in 1492, a basic, well-accepted fact that most of us learned in elementary school. And then I read from another source that Columbus came and killed lots of Native Americans with guns and disease. Fewer people know about that part of the story and it is possible, however unlikely, that this part of the story is wrong. Is it wrong not to cite my sources line by line in the paper?

It would be nice if I included endnotes for all of the sources I used, but is it necessary? Remember, we have tons and tons of information at our fingertips. All we have to do is send any information in question to a search engine and we will almost certainly find tons and tons of relevant articles that can confirm or deny what we read or interpreted.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

I didn’t write that last paragraph. Stewart Brand said it in 1984. But it summarizes the problem. The question we have to ask ourselves today, for the sake of tomorrow, is, “Should we free information?”