First anniversary and a free book
I almost forgot about it, but while perusing this blog's archives I found out that today--April 6-- is, in fact, my first anniversary in blogosphere. Today being an anniversary, I got to thinking about my reasons for writing the blog in the first place.

After Napster's peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing program was terminated by the US courts, I realized that there was a war going on, a war that will decide who will inherit the internet. On one side are the people who believe in the revolutionary power of free and democratic sharing of information. On the other side--the enemies of the open internet--are those who would like to appropriate the web for commercial purposes, people who would like to transform the internet into one gigantic shopping catalogue.

The enemies of the open internet have scored significant victories especially in the field of copyright protection. They were able to shoot down Napster, for one. The record companies in the US are also suing one by one those who share music files online. News last week was that they have even started suing people in Europe.

What the record companies is trying to do is wrest control of the internet from its users. They want to end the free sharing of materials in the internet that is subversive of the current market capitalist paradigm. Some magazines and newspapers (Wall Street Journal being on the lead) began withholding their internet contents to non-subscribers. If big business would have its way, there would be nothing more to hyperlink to in blogs.

This brings me to my reason for blogging. I want to contribute in this silent war of who will inherit the internet in however a small way. I believe that the internet belongs to people who want to share, and only secondarily to people who want to charge.

There are reasons to be optimistic as there seems to be a turning of the tide in this war. A Canadian court last week declared that downloading music files is not illegal under Canadian law. British pop star George Michael has also announced that henceforth his songs would be distributed in the internet free of charge. The Gutenberg online library has recently celebrated the 10,000th book it is freely distributing in the net. The trailblazer Napster also been replaced by Kazaa and Grokster, which are immune to legal persecution as they maintain no central database of files.

The Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT) has also thrown its weight in support of an open internet . Hoping to inspire other people to freely share their knowledge, the MIT launched its OPENCOURSE website, where it is sharing to the whole world all of its course materials--absolutely free, without exorbitant Ivy League tuition fees. MIT President Charles M. Vest hopes " that in sharing MIT’s course materials...we will inspire other institutions to openly share their course materials, creating a worldwide web of knowledge that will benefit mankind." Websites like MIT's are oases for aspiring autodidacts throughout the world. In the future of the open internet, people like FPJ cannot excuse their ignorance by pleading their having dropped out of school.

Another historic victory for the expansion of liberty in the internet is the publication of Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. It is the first book in history that is published by a major publisher (Penguin Books) and at the same time distributed freely in the internet (click here for your free copy). In the book (I have just began reading it), Lessig (who incidentally also writes a blog here) talks of a free culture:

[W]e come from a tradition of “free culture”—not“free” as in “free beer” (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement), but “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections.” A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

We must all fight for the internet's free culture and maintain its world wide web of peers. I'll post more on Lessig's book as soon as I finish it.