It is comparatively easy to demonstrate that information is not free. A book borrowed from a public library may be ‘free’ to the user at the point at which the service is delivered, but the costs are borne from taxation. There may be a mismatch between taxpayers and borrowers, but in practice every borrower is, in one way or another and with only rare exceptions, an indirect contributor to the cost of both the book and the library. It is possible to calculate the direct cost of each loan, and that piece of information can be used to make a basic calculation about the value for money of the service. Financial calculations, however, are only the beginning. What is far more difficult to assess is value. In part, the problem is that such an assessment has to deal with a negative, the thorny problem of the loss which may be incurred by the absence of information. This can probably never be more than an approximation, but information providers who operate successfully in the more competitive parts of the market-place have long since realized that they can charge very high prices to those for whom the lack of information is a matter of concern. The user who needs instantaneous financial data will not query their cost until it manifestly exceeds the losses which would be incurred by not having access to them. It is on this assumption that much of the commercial information industry has been built. This assumption, however, is now being challenged. There is a growing belief that information content should be freely available despite the costs of generating it. Among researchers, this is seen in the demand for open access to journals, an issue which is now beginning to have a political as well as an academic dimension. More generally, the challenge to the very concepts of intellectual property and copyright are producing legal as well as cultural and moral dilemmas which remain to be resolved.

The underlying cultural change is not so much in the solution of such conundrums, but rather in the articulation of them.