A free good is a good that is not scarce, and therefore is available without limit. A free good is available in as great a quantity as desired with zero opportunity cost to

society A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soci ...

. A good that is made available at zero price is not necessarily a free good. For example, a shop might give away its stock in its promotion, but producing these goods would still have required the use of scarce resources. Examples of free goods are ideas and works that are reproducible at zero cost, or almost zero cost. For example, if someone invents a new device, many people could copy this invention, with no danger of this "resource" running out. Other examples include computer programs and web pages. Earlier

schools of economic thought In the history of economic thought, a school of economic thought is a group of economic thinkers who share or shared a common perspective on the way economies work. While economists do not always fit into particular schools, particularly in modern ...

proposed a third type of free good: resources that are scarce but so abundant in nature that there is enough for everyone to have as much as they want. Examples in textbooks included seawater and

air The atmosphere of Earth is the layer of gases, known collectively as air, retained by Earth's gravity that surrounds the planet and forms its planetary atmosphere. The atmosphere of Earth protects life on Earth by creating pressure allowing f ...

Intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

laws such as

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

s and

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

s have the effect of converting some

intangible good An intangible good is claimed to be a type of good that does not have a physical nature, as opposed to a physical good (an object). Digital goods such as downloadable music, mobile apps or virtual goods used in virtual economies A virtual econ ...

s to scarce goods. Even though these works are free goods by definition and can be reproduced at minimal cost, the production of these works does require scarce resources, such as skilled labour. Thus these laws are used to give exclusive rights to the creators, in order to encourage resources to be appropriately allocated to these activities. Many

post scarcity Post or POST commonly refers to: *Mail, the postal system, especially in Commonwealth of Nations countries **An Post, the Irish national postal service **Canada Post, Canadian postal service **Deutsche Post, German postal service **Iraqi Post, Ira ...

futurists theorize that advanced nanotechnology with the ability to turn any kind of material automatically into any other combination of equal mass will make all goods essentially free goods, since all raw materials and manufacturing time will become perfectly interchangeable.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Free Good Goods (economics)

See also

References