Joi Ito on the impact of information sharing on daily life

Joi Ito is a member of Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization advocating for copyright reform. (wiki)

“I started my business at a time when the Internet was just beginning to make its way to the masses. The main difference between me and other entrepreneurs is in my vision of the Internet, which can be described with a quote from David Weinberg: “The Internet is designed to ensure that everything at once falls into place, and also so that people can create new things and could communicate with each other. " So, I created several enterprises on the Internet, as well as several, to one degree or another, using its resources. In these projects, the main emphasis was placed on ensuring that everyone could be part of the community, as well as create something new without asking permission for this. Feel the difference?

From the very beginning of the formation of the Internet, the cost of collaboration and the cost of its analysis began to decline. The cost of creating something like google would cost millions of dollars if it weren’t for the Internet. Thanks to the open source code and the Internet, creating your own search engine has become much cheaper. Thanks to lower costs for joint work, it has become much easier for entrepreneurs to implement a larger number of new projects.

The main goal of any business is to attract customers. That's all built on. The large portals of that time tried to force everyone to register, and at the same time they made every possible effort to ensure that the transition to their competitors was as expensive as possible. At that time, the term “stuck” was often used to describe situations of this kind. Nowadays, users are smarter and they know how to use different services from different companies for different purposes, since the Internet is becoming more and more open, and portals are no longer profitable to use the tactics of raising barriers. At the moment, services are created so that the user can create, and they also often focus on small businesses.

One of the biggest mistakes of all Web 1.0 was when AOL, and all the other big companies, erected these barriers wherever possible. Everyone (both users and entrepreneurs) began to realize that this could not continue. Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others are still trying to “bind you”, but in other ways. They are making efforts to become a platform through which people can share information and communicate. In general, the entire architecture of these portals has undergone changes. Not that everyone would begin to share disinterestedly, but I suppose that information and communication have become open for some time.

We live in a century when there are practically no technical barriers for most projects. For example, combining two knowledge bases into one or creating a community of people who like to edit music and video is not worth such an enormous effort. But, unfortunately, at the moment, the barrier is legislation for everyone whoever you are: a university that does not have the necessary agreements ( sorry, I’m a linguist, I couldn’t resist ^ _ ^ comment of the translator) or by an ordinary user who cannot always distinguish free information from that which is protected by copyright. The lion's share of all costs now comes from paying attorneys who are called every time two users or services begin exchanging information. And it is also very controversial from the point of view of society. That is, all problems with legislation “pop up” only after you have already started to do something. And the Creative Commons license solves this problem to a certain extent, thanks to the fact that it provides a general license, as well as the necessary technologies to monitor its compliance, which means that you do not need to call lawyers every time. I think the Creative Commons license will spur innovation boom on all fronts.

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I translated (ZolDoR), and checked Oleg ( OlegXxl )
Pirate Party of Russia