The great MP3 debate has come and gone around here, and in the tradition of most great debates, it has left us untouched. A few students have gotten around the Napster ban, and the rest of us-PC users at least-content ourselves with the Network Neighborhood. If there are any reformed music pirates who've deleted their collections, they remain silent in their righteousness. We've gone back to the days before Lars Ulrich was a household name, enjoying our ill-gotten music with only the vaguest pangs of sin nagging at our conscience.

Of course, the great debate wasn't very interesting; it derived most of its greatness from competing anti-corporate and anti-theft agitprop. This is disappointing, since there's an interesting and important issue at the heart of the whole MP3 problem: why do we consider data "property" at all?

Let's consider the case for physical property. My pants, for example, can only be worn by one person at a time. If someone else starts using them, that person interferes with my use of those pants. So if we want a system where one person can rely on being able to use a set of things, it makes sense to prevent people from using them without his permission. If someone else could use my pants and not interfere with my use of them, why prevent them? Property is founded on exclusivity of use.

Information doesn't have this characteristic-if I give you information, I haven't lost it. You and I can both use a piece of information simultaneously. So if property is founded on exclusivity of use, and exclusivity of use is a characteristic not possessed by information, why make information into property?

Our copyright, patent and trademark laws exist to promote innovation. The theory is that if innovators aren't given ownership of their innovations, at least for a period of time, they won't bother to innovate because it won't be profitable enough. The idea that they actually have some exclusive right to the information doesn't really enter into the equation; if it did, we wouldn't have artifacts like fair use, which allows unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material under certain circumstances.

But there are several examples which refute these premises and call into question the success of intellectual property law. Computer programmers working for nothing have produced many pieces of excellent free software, including the Linux operating system. Meanwhile, intellectual property must include among its accomplishments the practice of buying patents in bulk, a favorite tactic of companies seeking to ward off obsolescence by hoarding the rights to any innovation that threatens to supplant their product. Cold cash is not the only factor motivating innovators, and using it to spur innovation subverts the spirit it's trying to promote.

The fundamental contradictions in the idea of intellectual property haven't surfaced until recently because until recently, data was closely tied to physical objects that were hard to reproduce. The people who controlled the means of producing media could easily claim control over the information, because there wasn't another way to distribute it widely enough to dent their market share.

Along comes the personal computer, and suddenly we can create, exchange and replicate enormous amounts of data at negligible costs in money and time. I can take any of Shakespeare's plays in its entirety from MIT's online Shakespeare library, and I can take Eminem's latest hit from any of thousands of Napster users. Neither operation will set me back more than a few minutes and a thousandth of my disk space.

This is not a threat to our moral order; this is a call to rethink our views on ownership. There is nothing intrinsically good about tying information to things that only a few profit-minded companies can economically reproduce. The dissociation of data from objects is a real fact, not a bizarre new mutation, and we should accept that fact and consider it in reformulating our views on property.

Matt Weber is an associate editor for <i>The Amherst Student</i>.