The Net

After the net went mainstream, the inevitable clash happened. The establishment, eager to extend its control from the real to the virtual world, set out to regulate the new domain. Most annoyingly, it turned out that the new domain comes with different premises than the old. Peer-to-peer communication is effortless, mass dissemination of information is available to everyone, any notion of identity is vague, and -- worst of all -- the replication of virtual goods is almost instantaneous, cost-free, and perfectly faithful to the original. The average net user finds all this rather beneficial. However, those entities that base their influence in meatspace on controlling communication and on the scarcity of goods feel that their grip on power slips. This is especially so with cooperations whose goods are easily virtualised, such as music or movies.

Music on the Net

After all the noise that the so-called music industry (read, the labels/distributors) made about how they will all soon be starving to death due to all the online copying of music, it is nice to see that some of the real victims speak up. In particular, Courtney Love gave an eye-opening speech at the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference and Janis Ian published a thought-provoking article. The music industry has been ripping off artists for years and now they figure that their well crafted system of exploitation starts to lose its basis. The net breaks their firm control of distribution channels and threatens their economy based on a now artificial scarceness of goods. Another famous artist's insightful analysis of the current situation is Prince's A Nation of Thieves? It is encouraging to see how high-profile musicians produce such spot on assessments of the damage that the music industry inflicts on artists and music lovers alike. Who knows? The alternate future might look like this.

Collaborative Software Development

The writing is on the wall. Net-based collaborative software development is highly successful, especially in producing infrastructure software. In fact, it is successful to the point where the world famous software monopoly in Redmond has elevated open source to the monopoly's number one threat. In this context, Bruce Sterling's speech at OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source convention) makes for an interesting read.

Do You Trust "Trusted Computing"?

You had better not! Richard Stallman of GNU fame explains why "Trusted Computing" would more accurately be called "Treacherous Computing". Ross Anderson (of the University of Cambridge) provides detailed explanations and background information.

That Vexatious IP Issue

Intellectual Property is one of todays en vogue terms. It is generally used to lump together three entirely desperate notions, namely copyright, patents, and trademarks. This in itself is a dangerous overgeneralisation. Despite their differences copyright and patent law was initially enacted to further creative work and invention, in an effort to increase the benefit that society draws from these activities. Unfortunately, there is a strong tendency to abuse these laws to restrict the use, and hence benefit, that individuals can draw from creative works. This was, for example, recently illustrated in a rather forceful article on InfoWorld; in fact, even very business-friendly magazines, such as Forbes, voice critical opinions. The web site detailing the philosophy of the free software GNU Project has a whole list of related articles, many of which illustrate the dangers that copyright and patent law poses to free software, in general, and the innovative process that brought us the Internet, in particular.

It is not only the net that is brutally hit by the overeagerness of patent offices. At least in the US, patents are granted on genes, which has already led to women being denied tests for hereditary breast cancer.

There is an informative article on what the idea behind copy-right originally was and how it mutated into the current abusive system.

Want to Know More?

A democratic society is dependent on a free and uncensored flow of information. Unfortunately, a handful of media moguls controls what is featured in todays main-stream media, making it easy to shape public opinion. Collaborative news and discussion sites on the net serve as a small counter weight to this mono-culture. In particular, it is worthwhile to check out Slashdot (mostly computer and general science news), Kuro5hin (discussion of technology, culture, and politics; cf. their mission statement) and infoAnarchy (news and discussion concerning the freedom of information; cf. their mission statement).

Want to Get Involved?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an US-based, non-profit organisation that actively defends digital rights. The archives of the EFF also cover issues outside of the US and there are related organisations in many countries (e.g., Electronic Frontiers Australia). In Europe, a new organisation called European Digital Rights (EDRi) was recently founded. The Digital Speech Project works to reclaim the rights violated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of the US and related schemes. Although, this is a US centric project, you should keep in mind that some of the US legislation is very likely to set a precedent for the laws considered for other countries.