The Blind Giant Read Online Free PDF Page B

amazing in a garage somewhere. The right person in the right place, the stories went, could change the world. And it was true, to a point: in 1998 Google was being born, exactly as Gates predicted, and rapidly evolved into a creature to alarm even the powerhouse of Redmond, Washington.
    This sense of laws not applying online and the ease of digital copying threw Net users into direct conflict withcopyright holders and – in some cases – law enforcement and the courts. The rows continue: the UK courts faced simple disobedience from users of Twitter regarding injunctions against the publication of certain information early in 2011. The company itself went to court in America to secure the right to notify users that their information was being requested by the US government in connection withWikiLeaks – and won, prompting
Wired
magazine to suggest that Twitter’s corporate response should be the industry standard to demands from law enforcement and government for secret access to user data. 1
    There’s nothing specifically digital about breaking an injunction, of course, but there is a feeling among some Net users that the online world is a special case, a free speech zone, and that in cyberspace it is entirely appropriate to divulge what a print journalist, subject to national laws, dare not. On the other hand, government and legislation have also designated digital communications as a special case, asserting that they do not merit the same kind of protection given to older media. In November 2011 a US judge ordered Twitter to give up the data, despite filings by theAmerican Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the individuals named. The ACLU response was trenchant: ‘The government shouldn’t be able to get this kind of private information without a warrant, and they certainly shouldn’t be able to do so in secret. An open court system is a fundamental part of ourdemocracy, and the very existence of court documents should not be hidden from the public.’
    In the context of copyright, the famous statement byStewart Brand, publisher of the original
Whole Earth Catalogue
, has become a motto for those who believe any information once released into the digital wild is communal property, and that creativity – taking place in the context of a shared global cultural heritage – is not uniquely the property of whoever creates, but also of everyone else. What Brand said in 1985 and restated in 1987 was: ‘Information wants to be free.’ There’s more to it than that, of course, and the full quote from his
The Media Lab
is prescient – or, at least, insightful:
    Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.
    This philosophical clash has become an often vicious legal battle in the real world. The ethos of groups such as theElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and theFree Software Foundation (FSF) (in which the word ‘free’ means not just ‘given away’ but also ‘ungoverned’ or ‘unshackled’) evolved in opposition to the growing sense among lawmakers and corporations – and, to be fair, some citizens – that the Internet had to be regulated, whether for reasons of security and criminal law or for the purposes of making money. These Internet freedom advocacies are not primarily manifesto organizations, with a list of positive statements in their pockets. The early generation of Internet pioneers didn’t need a manifesto, because they all knew what they were doing – indeed, in most cases they knew one another – and so saw no point in articulating what they believed in because theylived it, wrote it and coded it all the time.