The free good is a term used in economics to describe a good that is not scarce. A free good is available in as great a quantity as desired with zero opportunity cost to society. Economics (deriving from the Greek words οίκω [okos], house, and νέμω [nemo], rules hence household management) is the social science that studies the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants. ... A good in economics is any physical object (natural or man-made) or service that, upon consumption, increases utility, and therefore can be sold at a price in a market. ... Scarcity is a central concept in economics. ... Opportunity cost is a term used in economics, to mean the cost of something in terms of an opportunity foregone (and the benefits that could be received from that opportunity), or the most valuable foregone alternative. ... ...

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, so this would not be a free good in an economic sense.

There are three main types of free goods:

• Resources that are so abundant in nature that there is enough for everyone to have as much as they want. An example of this is the air that we breathe.

• Resources that are jointly produced. Here the free good is produced as a byproduct of something more valuable. Waste products from factories and homes, such as discarded packaging, are often free goods (see also dumpster diving).

• 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.

Intellectual property laws have the effect of converting these goods to scarce goods by law. Although these goods are free goods (in the economic sense) once they have been produced, they do require scarce resources, such as skilled manpower, to create them in the first place. Thus intellectual property laws such as copyrights and patents are sometimes used to give exclusive rights to the creators of such "intellectual property" in order to encourage resources to be appropriately allocated to these activities. Dumpster diving is the practice of rummaging through trash, whether commercial or residential, to find items of use that have been discarded. ... In law, particularly in common law jurisdictions, intellectual property or IP refers to a legal entitlement which sometimes attaches to the expressed form of an idea, or to some other intangible subject matter. ... For copyright issues in relation to Wikipedia itself, see Wikipedia:copyrights. ... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or substance (known as an invention) which is new, inventive and useful. ...

Many futurists theorize that advanced nanotechnology with the ability to automatically turn any kind of material 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. This article is about the art movement, futurism. ... A mite next to a gear chain produced using nanotechnology. ...