This book is a study of an ‘alternative Internet’. Through a sequence of case studies it explores the use of the Internet as a set of information and communication technologies (ICTs) produced by a range of individuals, groups and organisations whose philosophies and practices I have chosen to term ‘alternative’. By this I mean a range of media projects, interventions and networks that work against, or seek to develop different forms of, the dominant, expected (and broadly accepted) ways of ‘doing’ media. These projects might be explicitly political in intent, such as the media activism of radical, ‘amateur’ journalists who make upthe Indymedia network of Independent Media Centres (IMCs). They might be political in less progressive ways, such as the use of the World Wide Web by political formations on the far right. Some projects deliberately challenge the economic status quo and by so doing seek to overturn received notions of property ownership. This is particularly notable in the anti-copyright and open software movements, where philosophies of communitarianism and usufruct offer alternatives to the political economies of copyright ownership and intellectual property rights. These issues have come to popular attention through the development of file-sharing and peer-to-peer programs such as Napster and Gnutella. The philosophy and practice of the open software and open source movements has led to new ways of thinking about what it means to be a creator.