Piracy as a Business Force

Article: Piracy as a Business Force. Adrian Johns

URL = http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/345/348

Excerpts

Adrian Johns:

“Today’s pirate philosophy is a moral philosophy through and through. An extreme form of the commitments seen more mundanely in various open-source and free-software circles, it has to do centrally with convictions about freedom, rights, duties, obligations, and the like (e.g. Coleman, 2005). In many cases these are tackled in a frankly libertarian framework, which bears comparison to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), the classic statement of modern philosophical libertarianism the title of which was reflected in Ludlow’s volume. But here and now the arguments extend to matters of information and knowledge: to what extent ideas originate in creative authors, and if so, how far they may But what I want to suggest here is that something deeper than creative business practices link the two. They hint at a longer history of culture that accounts for some of the reputedly distinctive properties of digital creativity today.

Today’s pirate philosophy is a moral philosophy through and through. An extreme form of the commitments seen more mundanely in various open-source and free-software circles, it has to do centrally with convictions about freedom, rights, duties, obligations, and the like (e.g. Coleman, 2005). In many cases these are tackled in a frankly libertarian framework, which bears comparison to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), the classic statement of modern philosophical libertarianism the title of which was reflected in Ludlow’s volume. But here and now the arguments extend to matters of information and knowledge: to what extent ideas originate in creative authors, and if so, how far they may legitimately be enclosed. And here they mesh with a discrete tradition of economics and political science, including rational choice theory. What the Sealand/Pirate Bay moment highlights is the extent to which that conjunction is, first, historical in general - it extends back beyond the 1960s, in fact, to the 1920s, and perhaps even to the 1820s - and, second, specifically a product of debates triggered by broadcasting. Those debates concerned the proper relation between media, knowledge, and the public. To trace today’s moral philosophy – the kind of thing seen in legitimate practical contexts in the anthropologies of hacker groups researched by Gabriella Coleman and Chris Kelty – back to pirate radio is to suggest for it a genealogy rather different from that most commonly invoked. The appropriate inspirations become not Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, but Friedrich Hayek and – especially – Ronald Coase and their assaults on public media. The difference matters because it in turn suggests that a much more ambiguous political legacy is in play.”

After explaining the prehistory of piracy through the free radio movement which ended in hypercommercialization,

“From Sealand to The Pirate Bay – from radio piracy to digital piracy. How much of a transition is that? In one sense, certainly, it is a great one. There is no denying that the powers and practices of digital media are very different from those of analogue. But digital culture is still culture for all that. And as such, continuities and distinctions across history remain consequential in shaping it. For example, the HavenCo-Sealand system is, at least superficially, structurally homologous to the enterprises set up to run Radio Atlanta, Radio Caroline, and their peers. It seems plausible that there are real inheritances deserving to be traced between the business practices of the pirate radio outfits and those of a data haven like Sealand.

More generally, common to the areas of contention in today’s ‘pirate philosophies’ are heavily moralized visions of the nature of creative work itself. An ‘ethos’ of openness or access is upheld as virtuous because true to the intrinsic character of genuine science. What is important here is not just that this normative tone is a product of history. That much is, as the philosophers say, analytic. It is the particular bit of history from which it has emerged that matters. What I am suggesting is that the moral philosophy of digital libertarianism today has a different genealogy from that usually invoked – a genealogy that leads not to Stewart Brand and ultimately John Stuart Mill, but to Oliver Smedley and Ronald Coase (and beyond them, indeed, to early radio pioneers, and even Victorian anti-patenting campaigners).” (http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/345/348)

More Information

Source: Pirate Philosophy. 'Issue 10 of Culture Machine [1]