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E-Commerce Cases and Materials Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), p.202 Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better. Beales and Muris, Choice or Consequences: Protecting Privacy in Commercial Information [excerpt] 75 U. Chi. L. Rev. 109 – 112 (2008) Introduction ??????We are frequently asked how, during our recent tenure at the Federal Trade Commission, we came to create the National Do Not Call Registry, one of the most popular government actions ever undertaken. The answer lies in our search for an approach to regulate the exchange of consumer information in commercial transactions. Information exchange is the currency of the modern economy. The growth of the internet, and the resulting new possibilities for collecting, storing, and exchanging information, have sparked a renewed interest in privacy and the ability of consumers to control the use of information about them. ??????We argue that information exchange is valuable and that regulators should be cautious about restricting it. The traditional approach to privacy regulation, based on the so-called fair information practices (FIPs), is inadequate. Instead, we argue, government should base commercial privacy regulations and policies on the potential consequences for consumers of information use and misuse. This approach focuses attention on the relevant questions of benefits and costs, and offers a superior foundation for regulation. It was this approach that suggested there