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There's a great story from John Perry Barlow (co-founder of the EFF and former Greatful Dead songwriter) in an issue of Wired from 1994 called "The Economy of Ideas". (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html) The article is amazing for confronting the large number of issues surrounding information and intellectual property. And this was years ahead of the mp3 fight or p2p or bittorrent. I highly recommend the article for people interested in that sort of thing.
There's one part in the article where he's describing the attributes of information, and it struck me that his description is relevant to this discussion.
II. INFORMATION IS A LIFE FORM
"Stewart Brand is generally credited with this elegant statement of the obvious, which recognizes both the natural desire of secrets to be told and the fact that they might be capable of possessing something like a "desire" in the first place.
"English biologist and philosopher Richard Dawkins proposed the idea of "memes," self-replicating patterns of information that propagate themselves across the ecologies of mind, a pattern of reproduction much like that of life forms.
"I believe they are life forms in every respect but their freedom from the carbon atom. They self-reproduce, they interact with their surroundings and adapt to them, they mutate, they persist. They evolve to fill the empty niches of their local environments, which are, in this case the surrounding belief systems and cultures of their hosts, namely, us.
"Indeed, sociobiologists like Dawkins make a plausible case that carbon-based life forms are information as well, that, as the chicken is an egg's way of making another egg, the entire biological spectacle is just the DNA molecule's means of copying out more information strings exactly like itself."
