Digital sharecropping

A colleague talked of the:

unpaid digital sharecropping edifice of Wikipedia

This has a nice rhetorical ring to it, but is wrong because it's an analogy between physical goods and information. Property and information obey completely different rules, so you can't reason by analogy between them.

If someone makes a copy of some information I hold, I don't lose anything, but the other person gains something. However, if someone takes my cake, then I lose it, and the other person gains it.

The moral is: [don't use the rules of property to reason about information]{style="font-weight: bold;"}.