Science Quote by Esther Dyson

Dyson is smuggling a market lesson into what sounds like a polite observation about media abundance: when content becomes effectively infinite, ownership stops being the central lever and distribution becomes the real battleground. Her claim that copyright will "change dramatically" isn’t utopian (copyright is dead) or moralistic (copyright is evil). It’s pragmatic. She’s pointing at a structural shift: the scarce resource is no longer the thing you can copy; it’s the human minutes needed to notice it.

That attention pivot does a lot of quiet work. It reframes copyright from a default mechanism of control into a negotiable tactic, useful in some contexts but blunt in others. When anyone can publish, copy, remix, or generate, legal exclusivity doesn’t automatically translate into economic value. Value migrates to what funnels attention: platforms, curators, brands, recommendation systems, communities, and the trust layer that tells you what’s worth your time. Dyson’s subtext is that the winners won’t be those with the strongest lock on content, but those who can reliably guide overwhelmed audiences through the noise.

Her line "Information consumes attention" is almost a corrective to the techno-optimism of the early internet era, when more data was treated as self-evidently good. She’s warning that abundance creates a new kind of poverty: cognitive bandwidth. In that world, copyright’s moral narrative (protect creators) gets crowded out by a colder economic reality: creators and companies will experiment with freer sharing, subscriptions, patronage, bundling, and access-based models because attention, not copying, is what must be rationed.