Unlike the age of the printing press (where making copies was still an expensive job) the (theoretical) costs of distributing information approaches zero. Assume that you want to read 1,000 pages of text daily (to allow for extensive browsing) the total data volume data volume is 2 MB daily and 700 MB annually (the cost of which are well below 50 Euro). Of course this does not apply to downloading films, software distro full CD images but it shows that the needs which a few years ago would have sounded utopian now can be satisfied very cheaply. Moore's prediction also still holds so that even for most of todays 'expensive' applications bandwidth will probably quite cheap. For a publisher of information, expensive ''distribution'' arrangements (such as keeping a stock of paper copies, opening distribution channels etc.) can be saved which greatly reduces the cost of publishing as well.
''What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. We now have the means to duplicate any kind of information that can be compactly represented in digital media. We can replicate it worldwide, to billions of people, for very low costs, affordable by individuals. We are working hard on technologies that will permit other sorts of resources to be duplicated this easily, including arbitrary physical objects (nanotechnology). The progress of science, technology, and free markets have produced an end to many kinds of scarcity. A hundred years ago, more than 99% of Americans were still using outhouses, and one out of every ten children died in infancy. Now even the poorest Americans have cars, television, telephones, heat, clean water, sanitary sewers - things that the richest millionaires of 1900 could not buy. These technologies promise an end to physical want in the near future.'' [9]
Notably, artificial scarcity goes against traditional justifications of property: '' The significance of private property was enunciated long ago with great clarity by David Hume in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Property, he argued, has no purpose where there is abundance; it arises, and derives its significance, out of the scarcity of the objects which become appropriated, in a world in which people desire to benefit from their own work and sacrifice. When the security of property is adequately assured, property owners generally see to it, that scarce "means" are directed to those uses which, within their knowledge and judgment, are most productive of what they want. Such is the diffusion of private property and of the desire to use it, that it is at any rate generally true that there is not a sufficient concentration of ownership of the supplies of a particular good, and of all the easily substitutable alternatives for it, to enable the owner to control prices of the property they own.'' [26, p. 30].