education, the rest of us have to deal with painfully gaining insight into value from what others saw and interpreted for us. However, in most instances, the value of sustenance derives from the balance between the cost of production and the needs of the consumer. As we noted above, the market equation for illicit drugs is an icon for the ideal business model; production costs determined by commodity availability and sales price determined by a consumer who has to have the product.

An important difference between digital content and tangible goods lies in the balance between creation and distribution mechanisms. Typically, digital content may be expensive to produce, but easy to distribute. Certainly, it is much easier to distribute data over the Internet than to send a bicycle from China to the USA on a ship. Even more strikingly, digital content is very easy to duplicate, whereas duplicating tangible goods involves obvious costs of material. Going one step further, digital content can often be modified with little effort and repackaged, while doing so for hard products is often just not economically feasible.

Because it is so easy to alter data, an extensive legal framework has been built around digital content, or, more generally, non-tangible content, under the name of Intellectual Property law. Copyright forbids duplication of content without proper authorization, or specific circumstances, patents allow one to create content but not to use it without proper retribution, and trade secrets can be invoked to protect expensive developments. Branding and trademarks also contribute to assessing digital content, by associating a trusted source to the information. The same write-up by the New York Times or by an anonymous blogger will not be given the same weight. Finally, digital content is associated with privacy. An evolving body of laws involves the encroachments to privacy afforded by the distribution of information over computer networks. These laws are culturally dependent, as for example France has forbidden for decades the indexing of databases with cross-references allowing gathering a consistent body of personal information about individuals. In the USA, there is no such law, so that social security numbers have been used to index all sorts of databases, with associated privacy encroachment. The cultural aspect of this diversity is grounded in the definition of freedom in the USA, much centered about the freedom of speech, while that of France is more centered around the respect of privacy. Privacy and freedom of speech are in conflict, as they affect each other negatively. For more protection of their privacy, the French have accepted more limitations on their freedom of speech than the Americans afford. Which system is better, of course, is a matter of conventions at least in part originated in religious traditions.

The fact that digital content is most often easy to modify has led to a body of protection practices. Digital signature technology allows evaluating whether information has been modified from its original version, by associating to that information a kind of a summary (the signature) that is synchronized with the content. Thanks to cryptographic techniques, it is not possible, or at least very hard, to change the information and the summary at the same time while keeping them synchronized. But of course, once the information is obtained, it can be modified at will. Therefore, sophisticated processes have been defined for controlling multiple versions and modifications of documents, by several persons if needed. Under the name life cycle management, systems can not only track the history of a piece of information, they can also recover the stage of the information at any time in its development. Who contributed, and what they did is logged carefully, and authorization mechanisms are put in place to properly assess further changes. To give an idea of the importance of such precautions, it is just a matter of looking at any Web page. Of course we can read it today, but can we refer it to it to somebody else who will look at it tomorrow? Will it be the same then? There are very few pages on the Web that are versioned

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