Unfortunately, even five year olds realize that the reasoning they use doesn't make sense.
I gave a short talk on the economics of information and started with a very similar example which was this; Given that 3 ounces of ink and 200 pages of nice 20lb paper, bound with sewing and combines with a cardboard cover into a book costs roughly $3 in reasonable quantities, costs $20 when the ink is used to print J.K. Rowlings story of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?
Clearly the same package with my scribbling about wizards and magic would likely not even be valued at enough to cover the $3 printing cost :-). So it is clear that the information has an intrinsic value, but what is less clear is how it develops that value and how much of the value can be captured.
The book publishers have gone down this road before[1]. 10 years ago the first 'text to speech' features came out in Kindle and Amazon backed down. Ten years later the Kindle is in a stronger place, so Amazon is perhaps inclined to not back down this time.
What I find particularly amusing, is that publishers, when asked back in '09 if it was "Okay" for parents to read their books aloud to their children, they agreed but felt reading aloud to a group of children (as a teacher might do), or to a group of people unrelated to you, was a violation of their commercial rights which unfortunately they couldn't do anything about. Not so with the Kindle, which is standing in here as the reader, that gives them someone to sue.
As technology gives people the ability to put information 'goods' in a real goods market framework (hard to reproduce, Etc.) the owner of those goods exploit those capabilities and litigate anything that would damage their capability to do so.
Personally, I think it is a matter of time before the economics of information become more mainstream in their understanding much like the changes that allow people to reason about "service work" in discussions of GDP. But it is going to take a while. I look forward to reading papers that talk about economies working with goods, services, and information as their drivers of economic activity.
I gave a short talk on the economics of information and started with a very similar example which was this; Given that 3 ounces of ink and 200 pages of nice 20lb paper, bound with sewing and combines with a cardboard cover into a book costs roughly $3 in reasonable quantities, costs $20 when the ink is used to print J.K. Rowlings story of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?
Clearly the same package with my scribbling about wizards and magic would likely not even be valued at enough to cover the $3 printing cost :-). So it is clear that the information has an intrinsic value, but what is less clear is how it develops that value and how much of the value can be captured.
The book publishers have gone down this road before[1]. 10 years ago the first 'text to speech' features came out in Kindle and Amazon backed down. Ten years later the Kindle is in a stronger place, so Amazon is perhaps inclined to not back down this time.
What I find particularly amusing, is that publishers, when asked back in '09 if it was "Okay" for parents to read their books aloud to their children, they agreed but felt reading aloud to a group of children (as a teacher might do), or to a group of people unrelated to you, was a violation of their commercial rights which unfortunately they couldn't do anything about. Not so with the Kindle, which is standing in here as the reader, that gives them someone to sue.
As technology gives people the ability to put information 'goods' in a real goods market framework (hard to reproduce, Etc.) the owner of those goods exploit those capabilities and litigate anything that would damage their capability to do so.
Personally, I think it is a matter of time before the economics of information become more mainstream in their understanding much like the changes that allow people to reason about "service work" in discussions of GDP. But it is going to take a while. I look forward to reading papers that talk about economies working with goods, services, and information as their drivers of economic activity.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090227/1759173928.shtml