Digital Age: Intellectual Capital
Intellectual Capital
The Third Wave has profound implications for the nature and meaning of property, of the marketplace, of community and of individual freedom. The meaning of freedom, structures of self-government, definition of property, nature of competition, conditions for cooperation, sense of community and nature of progress will each be redefined for the Knowledge Age -- just as they were redefined for a new age of industry some 250 years ago.
More............................... Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age
Recent regulatory reforms have attempted to take a body of law that originated in the 15th century, with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, and apply it to the electronically stored and transmitted knowledge of the Third Wave. A more sophisticated approach starts with recognizing how the Third Wave has fundamentally altered the nature of knowledge as a "good," and that the operative effect is not technology per se (the shift from printed books to electronic storage and retrieval systems), but rather the shift from a mass-production, mass-media, mass-culture civilization to a de-massified civilization.
A Third Wave government will understand the importance and urgency of copyright, patent and intellectual property to the economy and society and begin seriously to address it; to fail to do so is to perpetuate the politics and policy of the Second Wave. The key principle of ownership by the people -- private ownership should govern every deliberation. Second Wave policies centralize power in bureaucratic institutions; Third Wave policies work to spread power -- to empower those closest to the decision.