Getting paid to hack
Many of the products we buy today are no more than large collections of zeroes and ones. High-priced software, high-quality music, and valuable reference material such as computerized databases or CD-Rom encyclopedias are commercial products like any other, but the media of their transmission makes them different in at least one aspect: it is possible to copy them freely, or at least extremely cheaply. A compact disc of Elvis Costello and the Attractions is different from, say, a ham and swiss sandwich in many ways, but beyond the obvious is one reason that makes the nature of the two items and their production and purchase very different indeed: I can only eat the ham and swiss sandwich once, while I can listen to the Attractions CD repeatedly. This is a result of the fact that the CD contains information, rather than an actual substance such as the sandwich has. The consumable material in the sandwich is actual food and is gone after its consumption, while the consumable material in the compact disc is encoded binary data that will be around for the life of the physical disc. Since the sandwich can only be consumed once, we pay out an amount of money that signifies what one sandwich is worth to us. If I want another sandwi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Attractions CDs, Copyright Law, Public License, Attractions CD, Park T-shirts, Sound London, Puff Daddy, Marshall McLuhan, Windows Wordperfect, Wide Web, ham swiss, intellectual property, ham swiss sandwich, piece software, public domain, copyright law, commercial software, compact disc, source code, swiss sandwich, operating system, gnu public license, intellectual property theft, it's irrelevant producer, concept ownership ownership,
Approximate Word count = 3944
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page double spaced)
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