madisen

“The more information is free, the more opportunities for it to be collected, refined, packaged and made expensive,” said Stewart Brand, the technology visionary who first developed the formulation. “The more it is expensive, the more workarounds to make it free. It’s a paradox. Each side makes the other true.”

warriors

In 2021, when the archive celebrated its 25th anniversary, Mr. Kahle talked about the fate of the internet in an era of megacorporations: “Will this be our medium or will it be theirs? Will it be for a small controlling set of organizations or will it be a common good, a public resource?

Why do we care about openness? The reasons I hear given for being open can be grouped into three categories:

• openness and transparency support accountability – it enables us to delve inside the workings of an organisation or a piece of code to understand it better, detect where things are going wrong, and do something about it;


• openness removes

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As the regime governing intellectual property rights evolved and began disproportionately favoring IP rights owners, the concept of openness became a tool for challenging power relations and striving for more equality. In that sense, the promotion of reuse and access to informational resources was fully compatible with the need to defend human... See more

Early in the twenty-first century, the attempt to enact exclusivity-based laws for controlling access to digital resources in the US gave rise to the open movement. The movement quickly gained momentum. The champions of openness hoped that universal access to knowledge and culture, made possible thanks to the power of the Internet, would contribute... See more

In one scenario, these conditions would be personalized by each entity sharing their works through tools that allow them to express motivations for sharing. This path is currently being explored by the new responsible AI licenses introduced in 2022, and their creators envision a proliferation of licensing conditions chosen by licensors 5

Wikimedia’s contribution to a free and healthy Internet is not limited to its knowledge output — it also counts as a civic, democratic space.