As the networked information revolution reaches a threshold for repression, Becky Hogge finds its future has already been written, and the battle lines are clear.

When we are caught in the centre of an emerging phenomenon, in the eye of the networked information age's storm, only the clearest thinkers can lead us to safe harbour. Historians have the benefit of hindsight, while those writers who have predicted everything from the demise of the English language through SMS messaging to the disappearance of musical innovation thanks to peer-to-peer filesharing will no doubt be silenced in the passing of time.

A half dozen books have informed my thinking about the effects of the internet: Eric S Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which charts the rise of open source programming; Lawrence Lessig's trilogy on cyberlaw - Code, The Future of Ideas, and Free Culture; Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, a study of the way the internet affects commercial markets; and Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, which examines the economics of production in the intellectual commons.