Free to do what?

I seem to always and ever be posting about freedom on this blog - but here goes for some extracts from an essay I wrote recently...

Ownership

The main debate currently surrounding use of the Internet concerns file sharing protocols, programs and communities. The music industry has become the greatest opponent to these uses of the Internet, as they view it as a dangerous threat to their trade. Copyright law aside, various members of the industry argue that the distribution of pirate copies of songs and albums harms sales revenues - free distribution means to them salary cut.

More generally speaking, anything that would be protected by copyright law is potentially affected by the file sharing boom currently being experienced - photography, visual artistry, literature and software programs. To a certain extent, these are all replicable in softcopy form (software being softcopy-only).

Through the ideology of the Free Software Foundation, founded by Richard Stallman, and like-minded free-information proponents, it is becoming more and more commonplace to think of information as an inherently free commodity, and that attempts therefore to limit its availability are unfair, and that enforcement is unjust.

Stallman himself points out in his essay Why Software Should Be Free [3] that "free" should be free as in "freedom of speech" and not "free beer"; but throughout his article insists that use of software should not incur monetary overhead, and that the idea of ownership is indeed detrimental:

"A copy of a program has nearly zero marginal cost [...] so in a free market, it would have nearly zero price. A license fee is a significant disincentive to use the program."

By extension of ideology, most people have picked up on this idea and ported it to the arts. The music industry, photographers, publishers and so forth feel threatened by this new ideological wave.

Freedom

The idea of freedom of information is not new, but in the world of globally-accessible information, it has a great hold.

Two major cases of the expression of this freedom are notable: the ideology of the Free Software Foundation (along with those of its proponents and advocates of similar ideas on other domains) as aforementioned, and the idea of Freedom of Expression.

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself (art. 19) reads:

"Everyone has the right to opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Which backs the idea of free exchange of information, and still remains the foundational idea upon which peer-to-peer community ethos runs.

Whilst its use in that sense remains debatable and debated, it is a quintessential declaration when it comes to the freedom for one to be capable of informing and being informed.

The People’s Republic of China is under constant scrutiny for its practice of blocking access to certain sites using a variety of means, from IP blocking to connexion resets and IP poisoning. It is not possible to access BBC News from within mainland China, and Google-China performs special term filtering to prevent access to sensitive content.

Through pressure from governments and the general public, the PRC has been made to relax the blocking legislation gradually, and have been able to reinstate access to various sites from mainland China. But behind the scenes, it is still possible for users on Chinese networks to access tunnel sites - sites which perform the fetching of pages from blocked sites and return them to the user to bypass restrictions - and a well placed and setup proxy can aid in anonymizing users.

The general public feels that the users of Chinese networks are being oppressed in their freedom to obtain information, and generally back their attempts to find backdoors and sneakways into the larger, unrestricted Internet.

But file sharers also feel oppressed, and victimised by organisations’ uses of the words "piracy" and "theft" to describe their activities, which they themselves view as "altruistic contribution".

Rebellious: hackers & teens

The essay Conscience of a Hacker [6], known more widely as the Hacker Manifesto, is a more technical-oriented embodiment of the same ideology of freedom of expression. In the last two paragraphs, its author, "The Mentor", states:

My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all...

The first paragraph is a rhetorical defence for the actions of the hacker: traits of being more intelligent, of being curious, of being candid, which are all qualities sought for and desired, to try to justify the legitimacy of their action.

The second paragraph is a defiant message to those who wish to suppress their activities and ideas - a call to revolution of sorts.

These two ideas are present everywhere in teenage culture, the feeling of unjust victimization, and the feeling that consequently there is a justified rebellion.

As such, it is no longer a case of whether there is an altruistic matter of whether to share the information one holds - this information may have a rightful owner or some value, or neither, but the fact that it is being shared illegally is enough to warrant sharing. Whilst hackers claim to depart from such an ideology - and certainly the older generations do tend to - the newest wave are both hacker and teen, and work relentlessly at ways of creating a free world in cyberspace, either for the ideal or the sake of it.

For the conclusion.... wait until I have actually cleaned up the essay... All material open for discussion.