Legal and Ethical Issues

Creative commons helps people distribute what they made but still have some of the copyright protection.  Using conditions you choose, your creative work will reach people without having to hassle over certain laws.

 "Should information be free?" is a very hard questions to answer.  Personally i believe knowledge (journal articles containing math, science, etc) should be free because knowledge helps us as a society.  Withholding vital new information, breakthroughs and discoveries will only hurt us in the long run.  Other types of media such as movie, tv, and music should still be paid for but the access needs to be easy.  If it's easier to just steal it, people will most likely steal it without a second thought.  But selling it for a fair price on a variety of mediums will most likely get you the cash. Unfortunately greed is a big part in the sharing of information and companies would rather fight tooth and nail against pirating when they should be competing with it.  According to Joseph Havey's  article Open Access Research Grows in Popularity, research in particular is getting a heavy push to be free after the activism and death of reddit co-founder and creative commons member Aaron Swartz.

Security and Privacy

Privacy has become a bit of a luxury we've taken for granted.  If you're old enough to remember the days of limited internet access and no cells phones, then you remember how easy it was to be "off the grid" in a sense.  Pictures were shared in person in large binders called "photo albums", music was shared by recording it onto a tape or cd and physically bringing it to your friend.  If the person you called was not at home, there was no way you could reach them.  They were simpler times.

Today, our privacy (and in some ways safety) is up in the air at all times.  Unfortunately the biggest social media site in existence (the place where people willingly share ridiculously personal things) has some of the worst privacy flaws.  In Rebecca Greenfield's article Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even The Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private, she takes us through an unfortunate incident involving a family photo and the sister of the man who created this unholy mess.  Luckily this was just a harmless Christmas photo.  Imagine if racy or incriminating photos were uploaded? what then?  I thinks it's unfortunate that we've put so much blind faith behind social media.  It's time to step back a bit and think about what we're doing and how we should go about accomplishing it.