Wired: Freedom’s Dark Side

“Summer in Vienna. Virtual intelligentsia from across the
continent and beyond gather for Open Cultures, a convocation of the
open source movement’s self-proclaimed cultural wing. Dreadlocked
Italian geeks ponder P2P video with clean-cut German bloggers.
Slovenian net.art curators bend the elbow with Georgian patent
lawyers. They’re all here to celebrate the specter haunting
cybercapitalism: free information.

“Free as in beer, free as in freedom, free as in the slowly
collapsing pretense that 1s and 0s are worth any money, to anybody,
anywhere. The culture-centric take: The Internet, built by
professors and soldiers, went bust in the private sector’s fumbling
hands. Come 2003, ecommerce is all spam, fraud, and piracy, with
the shadow of copyleft eclipsing revenue. Open Cultures aims to
finish the job. They’d like to see free software evolve from a
nifty way to program computers into a broad wave of social reform.
It’s Solidarnosc for the technosphere…”

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