Among the most frequently voiced concerns I hear in my seminars concerns unauthorized copying. If the Internet makes it so easy to download material and make high-quality copies, aren’t designers just “giving it away” when they place their work on Web sites? What will prevent competitors from stealing or misrepresenting your work as their own? Couldn’t developers and builders copy your designs and use them elsewhere without your knowledge or consent? Doesn’t that present a potential liability issue for the designer?

The economic concept of information goods is a useful way of considering any form of professional expertise for hire. Information goods have the following characteristics:

Virtually all creative content can be digitized even if it was not initially created on a computer, and the Internet has become the primary distribution channel for every kind of digital material, including architectural design. It seems that creative content has become far more liquid and dematerialized. The Internet has dramatically reduced the cost and increased the ease of distribution of electronic information of all kinds. It allows perfect copies of digital material, legal or illegal, to be made at virtually no expense. You cannot stop illegal copying, and such copying is now easier than ever. But if you have ever had your work shown in the press (and designers love to see their work published), you have already exposed it to illegal copying. For that matter, the very act of building brings the risk of unauthorized copying and of false claims of authorship. Increased exposure to illegal copying is simply one of the costs of the digital age. But while you may have exposed your work to the risk of copying, you have brought it to a vastly larger audience than you ever had before.

The Internet is not the first instance in which technology has made copying easier and reduced the cost of distributing information. When photocopiers were first introduced, the publishing industry was highly alarmed at the ease with which bootleg copies of books and magazines could be made. Before videotaping became a household technology, the movie industry fought it tooth and nail. The truth is that photocopying actually increased the demand for books, and videotapes became a huge new revenue source for Hollywood. Why? Because creative material must be experienced to be appreciated. By exposing more people to your product, you are actually increasing your potential customer base, even if you are giving away a sample of it. The software industry routinely gives away demos and stripped-down versions of its products. By allowing people to experience the software, they increase the demand for it. When inexpensive videotapes became widely available, many more people started watching movies. Far from being the threat to the motion picture industry that Hollywood feared in the 1970s, the rise of home videos actually saved the movie industry by enlarging its market. Are videos copied illegally? Of course they are, but that has not prevented studios from making a fortune from the legal copies. Similarly, software piracy actually drives part of the demand for legal copies. Placing your software on people’s hard drives is the surest way to create a demand for it. Most users would rather try out software before buying it. If they don’t end up using it, it really cost the software author nothing. And most people will gladly pay for the software they actually use.

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