Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

collaboration—of free software production. In other words, historical outcomes proved to be more unpredictable, complex, and ultimately ironic than anyone could have ever imagined.
    As Linux and open source gained more visibility in the public sphere, corporations were not the only entities and actors to learn about as well as embrace F/OSS. Influential academic lawyers like James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, and Lawrence Lessig, who were all concerned with diminishing public access to knowledge, were studying the dynamics of F/OSS, and using themas the prime example to argue persuasively for alternatives and moderation in intellectual property law. Debian, the free software project with the largest number of members, had by this time committed to the idea of
free
software, a morality enshrined in its Social Contract (a list of promises to the F/OSS community) and Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG, clarifying the legal meaning of freedom for the project). By 1998, people inspired by the GPL had created similar licenses for other forms of content. Lessig institutionalized this expansion in 2002 in Creative Commons, a media-savvy and well-respected nonprofit that now provides a collection of alternative copyright licenses. More and more grassroots F/OSS projects, most of them small (one to five developers) and unfunded, were appearing. By 2000, there were over twelve thousand documented F/OSS projects hosted on SourceForge, a widely used central repository for F/OSS programs.
    Outside the sphere of F/OSS production, other Net enthusiasts and users were also deeply enmeshed in techniques of collaboration enabled by the Internet and cheap computers. For example, seasoned political activists who were part of the Independent Media Centers (IMC) first established in 1999, during the heat of the counterglobalization protests raging at the time in many European and US cities, were posting news and photos on Web sites powered by free software. Aware of the social and political implications of free software, some of these IMC organizers ideologically aligned the meaning of free software with a radical political outlook (B. Coleman 2005; Pickard 2006; Milberry 2009). Among netizens, new tools like wikis and blogs, many written as F/OSS, fueled the production of noncorporate-controlled content during an unprecedented commercial intrusion into the Internet—a trend that continues today, most famously with projects like Wikipedia (Benkler 2006; Reagle 2010; Shirky 2008).
    In short, F/OSS production was only one instance of a broader set of changes taking place on the Internet, propped up by the idea that information access is, if not a fundamental right, a noteworthy social good, and the best conduit by which to foster collaboration and creativity. Free software production was at this time the most dynamic, ethically coherent, and vibrant example of the new social phenomena, for it had developed into a full-fledged movement composed of a technical methodology, legal agreements, and a sophisticated ethical philosophy. Open source, as Steven Weber (2004, 7) claims, is “one of the most prominent indigenous political statements of the digital world.” As such, F/OSS has attained a robust sociopolitical life outside the digital world as a touchstone for like-minded projects in art, law, and journalism—some notable illustrations being MIT’s OpenCourseWare Project, School Forge, and the BBC’s decision to open its archives under a Creative Commons license.
    Still, all parties did not celebrate the forms of information access, open content, and collaboration facilitated by new information technologies. Major corporate copyright owners were aghast at the promiscuous file sharingenabled by a broadband connection, a home desktop computer, and peer-to-peer systems. As these technologies became more accessible, the copyright owners feared file sharing and piracy would become a routine part of everyday life, thereby cutting into their profit margins—although these fears were curiously at times conceptualized not solely in economic terms but also in cultural and moral ones. The following statement made at the turn of the twenty-first century by Richard Parsons, at the time the president of Time Warner, became a well-known declaration about the cultural threat posed by weak intellectual property protections:
    This is a profound moment historically. This isn’t just about a bunch of kids stealing music. It’s about an assault on