To understand the emerging economy in which ownership of information equals wealth, take jerome Lemelson as your guide. When he died in 1997, Lemelson had grown rich from 500 patents, including those for robot vision and the video camcorder.He didn't even have to build his video camera. Broad concepts and plenty of lawyers made his fortune.

Throughout the world patent law and lawyers are creating a new class of rich information owners. Indeed, Seth Shulman's Owning the Future: Staking Claims on the Knowledge Frontier shows how power overinformation- once seen as a common good - is being concentrated in big corporations and in the empires of new information "robber barons".

Among the immediate victims are academics who can't get access to data, inventors whose progress is blocked by broad patents and, of course, indigenous peoples who find their native medicines and crops seized by foreign corporations.

In the future, those who own information will be rich and the rest of us will pay.

- Reproduced from New Scientist