Wikipedia and many other websites are shutting down today to oppose a proposal in Congress on foreign Internet piracy, and the White House is seconding the protest. The covert lobbying war between Silicon Valley and most other companies in the business of intellectual property is now in the open, and this fight could define—or reinvent—copyright in the digital era. Everyone agrees, or at least claims to agree, that the illegal sale of copyrighted and trademarked products has become a world-wide, multibillion-dollar industry and a legitimate and growing economic problem. This isn’t college kids swapping MP3s, as in the 1990s. Rather, …
TO CONTINUE READING, SUBSCRIBE: Do we want open universal access to information, or greater access for those who pay?
This article speaks to the bias of those in power towards an internet where access is granted not by universality but by economic ability.
This battle to control access to information will become more important as our society shifts away from an industrial society based on material and commodity production with finance and capital as its strategic catalyst towards a society based on the creation-of and analysis-of information where the strategic catalyst is intellect and theory.
