This multiple leverage capacity of information in cyberspace casts the meaning of monopoly in an entirely different light from that conceived in conventional economics, providing far more acute evidence of the special character of information monopoly and cultural monopoly. Anti-trust or competition law, whose fundamental legal and regulatory assumptions derive from industrial economics of supply, demand, and control over the factors of production, is ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of rapid acceleration in the monopolization of knowledge and ideas within very brief windows of time. As proprietary control over ideas spreads through the information network, the ability to work with existing ideas to innovate new forms becomes reduced, thus creating the economic and social irony of information scarcity coexisting within an environment of enlarged access to information technology.[1]
In conventional economics, the place of the creative class is scarce, if nonexistent. The rise of the creative class comes to justify the need for different actors in the context of the creative economy. This new class comes to strengthen the consciousness of a new era, in which the must is innovation and/or creativity. The problem with the creative class is that it should be first of all understood and second of all protected.
[1] VENTURELLI, Shalini, “From the Information Economy to the Creative Economy: Moving Culture to the Center of International Public Policy”, Center for Arts and Culture, Washington DC, www.culturalpolicy.org
