Creativity Unchained

Today, we have access to an unprecedented amount of knowledge in digital form. The knowledge we have collected and improved over generations is our cultural heritage. Restriction-free projects like Wikipedia and Free Software are leaders in many areas; they prove what we can achieve when we set knowledge free.

DRM is an attempt to preserve a dying business model in the digital age and to restrict competition. Businesses try to model modern technology based on the old system in which businesses controlled all the content. This would eliminate many advantages of modern technology.

Copyright laws also have not quite been able to keep up. Publishers and citizens alike are calling for copyright reform, but with different intentions. We need to decide: Should we accomodate the interests of a small but vocal group of corporations; should we allow businesses to determine where the limits are for our sharing of knowledge and culture or are the moral and social implications of restrictive legal barriers too serious to ignore?