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We all agree that the free flow of ideas is essential to creativity. And we like to believe that in our modern, technological world, information is more freely available and flows faster than ever before. But according to Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin, acquiring information is becoming a danger or even a crime. Increasingly, the really valuable information is private property or a state secret, with the result that it is now easy for a flash of insight, entirely innocently, to infringe a patent or threaten national security. The public pays little attention because this vital information is technical",but, Laughlin argues, information is often labeled technical so it can be sequestered, not sequestered because it's technical. The increasing restrictions on information in such fields as cryptography, biotechnology, and computer software design are creating a new Dark Age: a time characterized not by light and truth but by disinformation and ignorance. Thus we find ourselves dealing more and more with the Crime of Reason, the antisocial and sometimes outright illegal nature of certain intellectual activities. The Crime of Reason is a reader-friendly jeremiad, On Bullshit for the Slashdot and Creative Commons crowd: a short, fiercely argued essay on a problem of increasing concern to people at the frontiers of new ideas.… (more)
User reviews
It would have worked better, then, to use the later chapters to develop a more nuanced picture of economic activity and its implications. The early chapters are much more successful (though there are still some excessive generalisations), going some way to build up a picture of knowledge as it is deployed in society and particularly within scientific practice, and of the implications for that of political and legal regimes. What it fails to do, in a debate already supplied with some noteworthy legal and economic thinking, is to distinguish itself either on similar terms or specifically as the contribution of a Nobel-winning physicist.
Surprisingly, the best chapter is probably the one on patent law, which he concludes: "This unhappy state of affairs has now led to loud cries for tort reform, both from concerned individuals and from businesses being bled dry by legal costs. Yet while legislatures may enact reforms soon, most people think they are unlikely to do what it takes to restore respect for technical law: ban patents for methods of reasoning, methods of communicating, discovery of things widely viewed as self-evident, and discovery of phenomena that occur on their own when humans are not present." That's more or less accurate, though it could stand to be more clear (it depends, for instance, on what exactly he means by "methods of communicating"), but this is about as clear and accurate as he gets.