There are so many Mistakes of the Day here, I can find no easy place to begin. Hopefully, you know what Digg is, otherwise, there is a whole world of catching up for you to do in general.

I’ll summarize it for you quickly: 1) Digg is a large-scale, community-driven news website, 2) Some of the people who use Digg are more tech savvy than those people who created Digg, 3) Digg’s community posted trade secrets about HD-DVD decryption, 4) Digg co-founder Kevin Rose spoke out, agreeing with this posting of trade secrets, though, it was only after Digg staffers failed to censor their own community.

I guess sometimes people just say or do the wrong things…

More often though, journalists say and do things that they hope will inspire discourse. Michael Malone with ABC news was probably striving toward this end with his recent statements. However, he only helped me realize how foolish a view, he and people like him, hold.

How appropriate that this scandal occurred on May Day, because only a utopian fantasist would argue that all information should be free. It was Abraham Lincoln who said that America’s two greatest contributions to mankind were the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Patent (i.e., intellectual property) law. And while I empathize with the frustration of folks who find themselves impeded from the full use of the latest technologies, those morons who want to destroy private property (and that includes trade secrets) put at risk the very future of innovation itself — not to mention that great creator of human freedom, entrepreneurship.

Sitting here, I can’t help but laugh under my breath even now as I re-read that statement.

The first thing is how backward these notions are about technology.

Mr. Malone says people who share trade secrets “put at risk the very future of innovation itself” — but I question his understanding of innovation as a result of that statement. Because, as it was so aptly put by Frans Johansson of Harvard Business School Press, in 2004, innovation is: a creative idea that is realized. Realization being key in this case.

One cannot stifle that realization without, as Mr. Malone himself put it, risking the very future of innovation itself. The irony here is we’re discussing the art of keeping secrets about tools that help keep secrets.

The important lesson learned in managing information at large scales is: by not sharing information you take more risks. One additional risk is without more than one copy, you risk the loss of your information. Ultimately and more importantly on the long term scale, you risk all the potential fruits of other mind’s work, which can only be realized through the release of the information. Given the broadest interpretation this means, this trading of a way to decrypt HD-DVDs for the general public is very much a form of innovation by the general public.

Unfortunately, its the kind of innovation that doesn’t help big business, just the general public.

Secondly, had people with such powerful innovations not released their ideas to the public in the past, places like Digg, and ABC News could not exist. More relevantly never could companies exist which sell HD-DVDs for encrypted platform players.

Lastly, allow me to ask a question and offer an observation of my own, this, to those people that think information should cost money, and those that think that entrepreneurship is what created human freedom.

Are you fucking crazy? Have all of you forgotten man was free long before the invention of the dollar, cent, yen, Digg, and HD-DVD? Man was born free, and so were his thoughts — man’s only bondage comes with the value he willingly gives to valueless abstractions like money.

Perhaps, this is why people who think as Mr. Malone, do not understand why equal value should be given to all information. They all seem to fall under this misconception that without industry, there is no business; that without business, there is no commerce; that without commerce, there is no market; and finally that without a market, there is no mankind.

Mr. Malone, while times may have changed a great deal (I know I work to help them change), it does very much still work quite the opposite of the way you suggest. Instead, its business, industry, commerce, and the market that need mankind to exist.

Its quite obvious all of us… need information.