Pirate Pride
11.Dec.03 - Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of ‘intellectual property’ was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? [Eben Moglen, the DotCommunist Manifesto]
Laws expanding the scope and duration of exclusive private rights in information [copyright, patent and trademarks and trade secrets] have been a constant since the late 1970s. Growing awareness of the consequences of these laws - combined with the emerging potential for autonomous cultural production - has produced a counter-movement in recent years. The promulgation of formal law from above is not enough to control human behaviour and creativity.
Everyone is an Enemy
An estimated 150 million people are now using a diversity of p2p systems to share music, video, software, games and text files on a regular basis. Competition within hardware manufacturing and broadband provider sectors is ensuring that access to the necessary commodities – storage space for media, broadband channels for transmission – is expanding. Copyright industry interests anticipated these developments through their experience of software piracy and Bulletin Board based media distribution in the late 80s and early 90s. One response was the introduction in the United States of the No Electronic Theft Act [NET] in 1997. Prior to NET, copyright infringement was merely a civil offence if performed for non-commercial purposes.
Subsequent legislation extended criminal sanctions to the development and distribution of tools devised to defeat ‘digital rights management’ [DRM] technologies whilst technical measures were integrated into media products to restrict their use.
An analogous introduction of criminal sanctions occurred in the area of payTV. Since its inception in the early 80s there has been a battle between decryption-card hackers and companies such as Sky, DirectTV and Canal+. Tens of millions of people worldwide use modified cards to avoid payment of extortionate monthly subscription fees. Initially the industry pursued the commercial distributors of the cards, but as this tactic failed they shifted their attention to users. Once-docile consumers are now to be approached as enemies.
That is the story from above. Let us look instead, with critical eyes open, from below.
Criminal Mass
Heedless of their redefinition as criminals by the global media godfathers and their crooked political friends, there are now an estimated 6 million people swapping media online at any given moment. The Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA] began their jihad with 261 legal actions against individuals in September 2003, after having encountered obstacles in their war against p2p software developers earlier that year. Instead of turning off their computers and returning to shopping as usual, however, users’ reaction was one of rage. Boycotts began. Vilification of media companies for their capitalist rapaciousness became commonplace in innumerable forums. One of the victims of the RIAA attack, a 12 year old girl living in social housing in Brooklyn, received so many donations that she ended up making a profit despite having agreed to a $US3,000 settlement with the RIAA to persuade them to drop the case. A legal fund to coordinate and finance collective defence for p2p users was set up at the tellingly titled www.downhillbattle.com. Lastly, and most saliently, the sharing went on in defiance of the threat of individualised punishment, with decreases in the numbers on public networks balanced by an increase in those participating in semi-private spaces for exchange and distribution. Despite the existence of the criminal provisions of the NET, they have yet to be employed.
Likewise PayTV hacking continues unabated in both traditional and innovative forms. Sky Italia, launched in July 2003 and monopolist of the Italian satellite market, have sought to use their control over premiership soccer to infiltrate every home with their annual 600 Euro ransom. In response, pirate television operators in Rome connected a television equipped with an authorized card to a transmitter and rebroadcast signals in the clear to whole districts of the city on several occasions throughout autumn 2003. This exemplary action constituted a spectacular intervention into the popular imagination - responding to a real need for a sense of identity felt by Romans, whilst attacking the commercialisation of popular culture by using acts rather than words.
weseize roma