Open Access News

[After Hurricane Katrina], some evacuees posted their whereabouts on existing sites like craigslist, others turned to a variety of new message boards created specially for evacuees. Almost immediately, there were too many sites to choose from. A grandchild looking for her grandmother, or a father for his son and wife, had literally dozens of online databases to search. The internet offered a solution....An international, ad hoc group of self-described geeks built a system that automatically combined information from the dozens of refugee listing sites into a single, searchable database...That database, at Katrinalist.net, is tangible evidence of the beauty and power of internet technology in the hands of well-meaning citizens. It's also an endangered species. In a few years, legal doctrines being aggressively pushed by corporations and law enforcement officials might prevent something cool and useful like this from ever happening again. In a variety of cases, courts are holding that people can't access internet computers without first getting authorization from the computer's owner....For example, many ISPs and some prosecutors are arguing that it's a crime to use unsecured wireless access points without the explicit permission of the owner. Antispam crusaders advocate blocking any e-mails that haven't been whitelisted first. Airlines like American and auction sites like eBay -- which want customers to visit their websites, view their ads and "join the community" -- have won court injunctions against companies that collect price information on plane fares or auctions to help consumers comparison shop. Under ancient legal theories like "trespass to chattels" and ill-advised modern laws like the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime statutes, courts are holding that if you don't have authorization, you can't access computers. And if you can't access computers, you can't collect data about airfares, auctions or evacuees. The better world is one in which we don't need to seek permission or risk punishment to do cool stuff that makes the world a better place. In the early days of the internet, a lot of people felt that we'd found that better world. Thanks to the internet's open protocols, many of the most useful innovations, from the web to instant messaging to internet telephony, emerged without developers needing anyone's permission to run their cool new code....On the internet, having to ask permission first can kill the creation of a useful new tool. The law should treat the internet as open by default -- a public resource rather than a gated community. This doesn't mean that we can't protect our networked computers or data with copyright law, passwords, firewalls or perhaps even terms-of-service agreements. But rather than asking whether a user obtained permission to access computers connected to the internet, the law should ask whether the owner did anything to prevent public access.