Abstract:

 The rise of the Internet has brought explosive development of information, leading to the growth of informationbased “new economy” model. At present, all aspects of the Internet activities are about information production, gathering, searching, collection, processing, storage, management and consumption. Ordinary netizens and information consumers can obtain enormous free information services, while a lot of information had to be paid before the era of the Internet. The paper,in the perspective of historical backgrounds, aims at exploring how information property rights are originated and then subject to adaptation to meet the needs of the new economy model. The essence of this process is that the traditional copyrights and personality rights have obstructed the free flow of massive information, so it is essential to reinterpret the nature of the information property rights to make them nonobstructive, internalized and facilitative in information application.

Key words: property rights, new economy, business models, commons