Free Geeks by Jon Katz

the
Chicago Tribune
site, on computer mailing lists and on geek employment agency websites. He checked out apartment rentals through www.relconapartments.com and grabbed an affordable-sounding, two-bedroom w/balcony on the train route in suburban Richton Park, sight unseen.
    To plan their route, he bought a Rand McNally TripMaker CD, copied it, and then returned it to the store. Geeks do not, as a rule, pay for things digital, except for products adjudged so outstanding that their creators are deemed deserving of payment; they trade, borrow, copy (“burn”), or hack them instead.
    Insofar as they are political at all, many geeks and hackers (a term frequently misapplied, used for computer vandals and thieves, but more accurately referring to computer problem-solvers and tinkerers) share this principle: Keeping the Net free from corporate and government control is a sacred task. Getting stuff for free on the Net is a matter of pride, therefore, a demonstration of determination, computing skills, and righteous geek thinking.
    Property, Jesse informed me, came in two varieties, material and intellectual. You paid for the former, but almost never for the latter. Geeks were, in fact, redefining conventional notions of commerce and ownership.
    Jesse had a music playlist hundreds of songs long, for instance, but couldn’t remember the last CD he’d actually purchased. He read news online, but rarely bought a newspaper or a magazine. Journalists, educators, and pundits frequently fuss that kids like Jesse don’t read or aren’t well informed; in fact, they read enormous amounts of material online, and are astonishingly well informed about subjects they’re interested in.
    Geeks were the first to grasp just how much information was available on the Web, since they wrote the programs that put much of it there—movie times and reviews, bus and train schedules, news and opinions, catalogues, appliance instructions, plus, of course, software and its upgrades.
    And of course, music, the liberation of which is considered a seminal geek accomplishment.
    Virtually everything in a newspaper—and in many magazines—is now available online. In fact, some things, like the latest weather and breaking news, appear online hours before they hit print.
    Yet while Jesse had gone through literally thousands of downloaded software applications, he’d never paid for any of them. He didn’t even quite get the concept. The single cultural exception was books. Perhaps as a legacy of his childhood, Jesse remained an obsessive reader. He liked digging through the bins of used bookstores to buy sci-fi and classic literature; he liked books, holding them and turning their pages.
    “But you pay for material things,” he explained. “I’d never pay for any software or music, but I’d never steal a TV from a store.” He didn’t consider acquiring free music online to be pirating or theft, though. Intellectual property belonged to everybody.
    In fact, Jesse and many geeks consider themselves liberators of ideas and culture, using the Net to literally pry them from what they see as greedy corporations and powerful, censorious institutions. As mass media has grown corporatized—with journalism, publishing, moviemaking, and the music business getting sold and merged into fewer and larger monoliths—geeks feel ever more entitled to take whatever intellectual property they want. The individual creators of this property—writers, musicians, artists-can and will find alternative means of generating income, they’re convinced.
    It’s an enormous idea for a capitalistic country with longstanding ideas about property and payment, and it’s putting the ascendant geek culture in increasingly direct conflict with such institutions as the legal and medical professions, both of which have vowed they will fight the notion of free, “open source” information on the Net.
    So far, though, the geeks seem to be winning. They’re bringing the music industry to