> The difference between data and oil is that you aren't going to drive to the oilfields one morning and find that it's all been hacked and stolen.

Ask Western oil workers in Libya or Nigeria or Venezuela or Mexico (depending on the decade) how accurate they feel that sentence is. Oil concessions have been regularly expropriated.

Fine then, stolen at the click of a button. Oil is a finite resource, software isn't. We create our own scarcity. Oil = software is a lazy metaphor.

As opposed to the stroke of a pen?

I guess saying 'oil' is being a bit too specific. It is more like the 'energy' that drives the modern economy? and that is sold and you find new avenues everyday of collecting(producing) it. But yeah, it digresses a bit too much from this post I guess.

Unless the real resource companies are grabbing for involves "EXCLUSIVE data", which allows them to extract/demand value as the gatekeepers.