The freedom of the internet is making some important and high-placed people very, very unhappy. The government, on a high-stakes, high-tech witch hunt to catch online freeloaders (ie regular Americans), is expanding its war on warez. The current situation reflects a watershed moment. The battle for the future of the internet is being waged. Will it retain its libertarian/anarchistic nature or will it be subverted and turned into a plaything of big business? What can we really do if the coporate slave-masters of our country decide they want the internet to be a certain way? A place where intellectual property czars can sell their music and video with little or no cost of production/distribution while diminishing the concept of personal consumer ownership of purchased goods. Patent and copyright law is being used to strangle culture and to enslave the very people who collectively produce it. Its also a problem of power. They have it and we don’t. Content producers are twisting arms in Washington and writing legislation for their lapdogs like Sen. Fritz Hollings to increase their control and to criminalize any behavior that presents a threat to their business.
What can be done to fight it? That’s what I’ve been thinking about for a while. I have thought of a few obvious ideas. For one thing, don’t buy anything from these companies if you can help it. They get their money from you and me. Through movie tickets, media purchases like dvds and cds, and advertising. I keep the television off for all but about 30 minutes a day when I want to catch my favorite show on TV Land and I try to never rent or buy dvds and only cds when I really want them. Instead of buying something try to share and borrow with your friends. This works for everything, books, music, video. You can even try pooling the funds of many people if you want to buy things. I think there must also be an emphasis on making information free by using strategies like a reverse copyright such as the Gnu General Public License which expressly protects the right to copy and distribute. This idea could be used for all cultural products. Books, songs or movies that anyone could freely copy.
If the internet gets the hammer dropped on it we could always build tiny island networks where we share and collaborate without fear from the government.