Electronic commerce and free speech
Ethics and Information Technology 1 (3):213-225 (1999)
| Abstract | For commercial purveyors of digital speech, information and entertainment, the biggest threat posed by the Internet isn''t the threat of piracy, but the threat posed by free speech -- speech that doesn''t cost any money. Free speech has the potential to squeeze out expensive speech. A glut of high quality free stuff has the potential to run companies in the business of selling speech out of business. We haven''t had to worry about this before, because speaking in a meaningful way to a large audience was expensive, and people couldn''t afford to do serious mass speaking for free for very long. The Internet has made it much cheaper. It doesn''t take much to give out information to the whole world, every day, for free, for years. And people do. If we are trying to increase the abundant dissemination of information, free speech is good. If we are trying to increase commerce in information, free speech is arguably bad, in that it competes with pay speech. Information merchants would obviously prefer that the only speech in the marketplace be pay speech. In the past two years, commercial content owners have scored significant progress in herding free speakers off the Net. There''s an important synergy between persuading the government to give your industry some friendly new laws or regulations, and using new and old legal tools to make life more difficult or expensive for inconvenient competitors who aren''t necessarily doing anything illegal. Recently, businesses have been able to combine the two strategies to make the Internet a much safer place to sell speech, by making the Internet a less friendly, more dangerous place to give away speech for free. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,705 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesKory Schaff (2000). Hate Speech and the Problems of Agency. Social Philosophy Today 16:185-201.
J. K. Miles (2011). Hatred, Hostility, and Defamation. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 25 (1):25-32.
Caleb Yong (2011). Does Freedom of Speech Include Hate Speech? Res Publica 17 (4):385-403.
David A. J. Richards (1999). Free Speech and the Politics of Identity. Oxford University Press.
Robert Sparrow (2004). Censorship and Freedom of Speech. In Healy (ed.), Censorship and Free Speech. The Spinney Press.
Rae Langton & Jennifer Hornsby (1998). Free Spech and Illocution. Legal Theory 4:21-37.
Mary Lyn Stoll (2005). Corporate Rights to Free Speech? Journal of Business Ethics 58 (1-3):261 - 269.
David Braddon-Mitchell & Caroline West (2004). What is Free Speech? Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (4):437-460.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads1 ( #274,982 of 549,130 )Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
