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This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term "intellectual property". As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.

Take the open access movement, which has campaigned to ensure that scientific articles are freely available to the public, who ultimately paid for the research with their taxes. Historically, most scientific writing was confined to expensive scholarly journals and essentially available only to people with university affiliations. Some publishers resisted the open access movement, but trends are against them. In March this year, for example, the US Congress made permanent a requirement that all research funded by the National Institutes of Health be openly accessible, and other countries are following. Within a decade or two, it is safe to say that all scientific literature will be online, free and searchable. Journal publishers will still be paid, but at a different point in the chain.