Introduction: Internet redux

When the Internet truly took off as a mass medium in 1996 in the guise of the World Wide Web, it was like an untamed wilderness ripe for discovery, and new users marvelled at the wondrous and instantaneous way in which information and images could be pulled to their desktops from around the world. It was an uncharted digital landscape with endless potential and possibilities. In 2005, a mere nine years later, our perception of the web is somewhat different. The first wave of e-commerce has come and gone, and lessons have been learnt. The survivors of the dot.com boom and bust of the early millennium – Amazon, Google, Yahoo, e-Bay – are now the doyens of the web, drawing strength from their global customer base and the ubiquitousness of their brands. More and more of us are happy to immerse ourselves in the virtual worlds of the Internet and to browse, buy and bank online. But perhaps most importantly in the context of media rights, more and more of what we do online and the ways in which the online world is organised are sanctioned by licence agreements, registration and contracts all protected under the sign of intellectual-property law. The analogy of the Internet as a wide-open frontier offering a brave new world is a common one, but so too is the belief that huge tracts of this virtual world are being fenced off for exclusive use available at a price.