Paper Abstract: Ontology of Information

I’ve just put the abstract of a new paper on my SSRN page. Temporary title is: Ontology of Information and its Lessons for Intellectual Property. The full abstract is available here (I am not yet able to make the full text available online). Here are a few lines from the abstract:

What is information? It this question answerable? Why should intellectual property scholars bother conceptualizing information? We are told that we live in the technological age, in which information is a prime resource. Most IP scholars would probably agree that, at some level of abstraction, their respective disciplines concern property-like entitlements with respect to that resource called information. Put differently, information is the subject matter around which IP laws tailor exclusory regimes. In this light, the thinness of the theoretical discussion about IP subject matter *as information* is quite striking…

Pondering the concept of information, or the nature of IP subject matter *as information*, yields nonobvious perspectives both on theoretical and practical issues. Borrowing insights from information and communication theories, I propose a framework that defines information as a meta-concept. Information is a significantly unpredictable, global dynamism, in which medial messages are constantly being created, delivered, processed, modified, changed and exchanged. Messages are the objectively detectable apparitions of that process. For analytical purposes, I propose that the information process can be broken down to atomic sequences of communication events. Each singular sequence involves a medial message passed from an originator to a recipient. The medial message, the essence of IP subject matter, fulfills two quasi-formal requirements: It must be both perceptible and comprehensible…

It shall be demonstrated how the model can describe and explain basic copyright concepts and principles using its own general terms. It is further shown how the information model perspective can throw new light on specific issues. I argue that policy debates surrounding IP law can benefit from a robust theoretical conversation geared toward a more solid understanding of information. The information model introduced in this paper can hopefully furnish some initial insights in this direction.