with open wires radio spectrum is perfectly consistent with a world where
exclusive cable lines are reserved to those who pay. The open and the closed
always coexist and depend upon each other in this coexistence.

But there are _reasons_ why some resources need to be controlled and oth-
ers do not. We've seen these reasons before, but we are in a better position
now to understand them. While some resources must be controlled, others
can be provided much more freely. The difference is in the nature of the re-
source, and therefore in the nature of how the resource is supplied.

This was the insight of many in the Enlightenment and, within our tra-
dition, Thomas Jefferson most forcefully. Listen to Jefferson writing to Isaac
McPherson in 1813 about the character of the patent power:

____ (1) If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of ex-
____ clusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
____ which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to him-
____ self; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of
____ everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. (2) Its peculiar
____ character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other pos-
____ sesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruc-
____ tion himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine,
____ receives light without darkening me. (3) That ideas should freely spread
____ from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction
____ of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly
____ and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, ex-
____ pansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and
____ like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, inca-
____ pable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. (4) Inventions then can-
____ not, in nature, be a subject of property.[6-23]

I've added numbers in (parentheses) to Jefferson's text to make clear the dis-
tinct points he is making...

First, Jefferson is describing the nature of an "idea." An idea is, in the
terms of the economist, _imperfectly_excludable._ I can keep a secret from you
(and therefore exclude you from the secret), but once I tell you the secret, I
can't take it back. We can't (yet) erase what has entered our heads.

Second, he is describing the _nonrivalrous_ character of resources like
ideas. Your consumption does not lessen mine, as your lighting a candle at
mine does not darken me.

These two points then suggest a third: that "nature" has made this world

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