internet

It's important that we remember what makes the Internet so interesting and unique. There are two crucial characteristics:

1. It's fundamentally decentralized, meaning you can cut out any part without affecting the rest,
2. It allows freedom of access, meaning you have the same ability to access and write it as anyone else.

Because they permit extraordinary flexibility and rapid growth, both of these characteristics have brought the Internet way beyond any other network. Today, they are endangered. How come, and what can we do about it?

It's the big problem of the net: how do you make money if everyone can access the files you produce for free?

Earning money is not evil, it makes it possible to produce more art or information. It's a waste of talent to need a day job to support what you consider your real work.

In the old world it was simpler (but not easy): make a deal with a publisher, they will pay you for the privilege of printing (or publishing in some other way) your works, and their customers (perhaps with a bookshop or something in between) will pay them to get access to your works. Copyright ensured that publishers would have to make a deal with you, they couldn't just take your work as published by another publisher and copy it.

Computing Our Liberty: May 2005

Somewhere in the milky way galaxy, far far away from some alien\'s home, on a third blue planet around the yellow giant star that its inhabitants call Earth, on a northern hemisphere, continental formation called Eurasia, country called Croatia, on a hot spring, but summer-like day, in a camp-house-like \"box\", a small and fragile human being writes another small letter to the world, one to be transmitted throughout the international network, one that is once more - computing our liberty. A loose \"rant\" with a purpose - to keep up the voices!

What a beautiful planet we have here, in a beautiful part of the space (if there is such a thing as an \"ugly\" part of space), so rich, so vast, so inspiring - bound to make us create and then again create upon as we get inspired again, getting better and better at it - until we created a civilization, a civilization of the 21st century - aware of the world around us, even more, a space around us. But is this civilization as civil as it ought to be? Is this society as societal as it ought to be? Do human beings really care about this world, a world of humans?