But we won't let this supermachine copy. Much to everyone's surprise, information created in one corner finds its way into all the other corners rather quickly. Because our previous economy was built upon scarcity of goods, we have so far fought the natural fecundity of information by trying to control every act of replication as it occurs. We take a massively parallel copy machine and try to stifle most acts of reproduction. As in other puritanical regimes, this doesn't work.
Information wants to be copied.
Information wants to be free to wander and reproduce. Success, in a networked world of decentralized nodes, belongs to those plans that do not resist either the replication or roaming urges of information. Sprague's encrypted meter capitalizes on the distinction between pay and copy. If revenue collection were based on monitoring the use of software inside a computer, vendors could dispense with copy protection altogether. Cox is a software developer specializing in object-oriented programming.