Originally Posted by Sands

Information, yes, but remember that you're not paying for (nor are they creating/releasing) something that can so easily defined as just "information". I believe that definition is too simplistic, and that it doesn't take into account the packaging of that information, the aggregation of that information... the finished product that is built from that information.

This might be, in retrospect, a bad analogy but it was the first thing that popped into my mind as I'm writing this:

1) Universities conduct experiments in psychology, and then they publish their findings. Now, their findings are more toward what I personally would define as "information"... it's raw, and relatively unpackaged (it's somewhat packaged because the experimentors have to interpret data and such, but this isn't a perfect analogy).

2) Studies about a particular subject amass and create a field of study, or a large body of information about a certain phenomenon. As an example we'll use anxiety disorders.

3) An author spends time and money to sift through this huge body of literature with the intent of writing a simple and easy to understand book on anxiety disorders, or perhaps a textbook. He publishes his book, and it is, at this point, what I consider "packaged".

4) Now, someone illegally downloads his ebook. They aren't getting access to just information. They're getting access to information and packaging, and illegally at that. That downloader would have been able to access the information (the research papers) in the same way the author did, would have been able to read them over and aggregate information in the same way the author did, but he didn't.

So, in summary, information may be free, but effort isn't. To say that a finished product is just information neglects the production process.