the Exclusive Rights Clause and the expanse of protection for free speech
they established in the First Amendment. The aim of an economy of ideas
is to create incentives to produce and then to move what has been produced
to an intellectual commons as soon as can be. The lack of rivalrousness
undercuts the justification for governmental regulation. The extreme pro-
tections of property are neither needed for ideas nor beneficial.

For here is the key: _The_digital_world_is_closer_to_the_world_of_ideas_than_to_
_the_world_of_things._ We, in cyberspace, that is, have built a world that is close
to the world of ideas that nature (in Jefferson's words) created: stuff in cyber-
space can "freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral
and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition," be-
cause we have (at least originally) built cyberspace such that content is,
"like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening [its] density at any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical
being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation."

The digital world is closer to ideas than things, but still it is not quite
there. It is not quite true that the stuff in cyberspace is perfectly nonrivalrous
in the sense that ideas are. Capacity is a constraint; bandwidth is not un-
limited.[7-30] But these are tiny flaws that cannot justify jumping from the
largely free to the perfectly controlled. There are problems of coordination
and constraints of scarcity. But the solution to these problems is not neces-
sarily systems of control or better techniques of excludability. That cyber-
space has flourished as it has largely because of the commons it has built
should lead us to ask whether we should tilt more to the free in organizing
this space than to the controlled that organizes real space.

Put differently: These imperfections in the capacity of cyberspace -- that
together may make it more rivalrous than ideas are -- should not by them-
selves force us to treat the resources that cyberspace produces as we would
treat real-space resources. If by resisting the model of perfect control we
gain something important, then we should do so.

///\\\

In the context of the media, we can be a bit stronger than this. Over the
past twenty years, we have seen two changes in the media that seem to pull
in different directions. On the one hand, technology has exploded the num-
ber of media outlets -- increasing the number of television and radio stations
as well as newspapers and magazines. On the other hand, concentration in
the ownership of these media outlets has also increased. This increase in

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