Open Source/ Digital Cilvil Liberty

In the last lecture of the semester we focused on Electronic Civil Liberties, the Creative Commons and Free and Open Source Software. We looked at the web site Electronic Frontier Foundation and looked at the cases they were defending such as the NSA/AT&T spying case . This case is quite extreme and it is unbelievable how organisations are tapping into our lives, finding out our every details. This site proved very beneficial in regards to the assessment I chose to do on Privacy issues on Facebook and it is unbelievable that private information is being shared despite how many legal policies are broken by doing so.

The Creative Commons is a non profit organisation that provides artists with the freedom to change their copyright by giving their audience their work for free changing 'All rights reserved' to 'Some rights reserved'. This provides their target audience with freedom to experiment with their work, for remixing and reuse making the Creative Commons challenge regular copyright.
The Video we watched was a talk from Ted.com presented by Lawrence Lessig, the creator of Creative Commons. He spoke passionately about the laws of copyright needing to change and his reasons why we should have some freedom when it comes to resuing peoples work.

Free software was founded by hacker Richard Stallman and he created a free operating system made from free software. It's name was changed to Open Source as it is not exactly completely free but open to use. Adam then explained the range of free software/open source and the programs that we can use instead of bought software,and he also stated that the free stuff is in some cases better then what we pay for. We we told to use some of the programs made availabe for our free use to see if we like them. I chose to look at Mozilla Firefox as I was on of the few students in the class who are still browing the web on Internet explorer. Truthfully I have not yet seen much of a difference and as a force of habit keep opening Internet explorer. In such a small time it is hard to explain the increased benefits of Firefox but so far I have discovered that you can get the page source for a page and the tabs of the server are better organised.

Reading: Why Software should not have owners
Richard Stallman argues in his article 'Why Software Should not have Owners' that software with propriety restrictions have a negative impact on society as people in this day and age are continually remixing other people's work to make it there own (especially in the digital world). Stallman believes that in order for people to increase their creativity and share their ideas with other artists then for this to happen in harmony software should be open.