Pirate Philosophy
Issue 10 of Culture Machine
URL = http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current
Description
“Pirate Philosophy explores how the development of various forms of so-called internet piracy is affecting ideas of the author, the book, the scholarly journal, peer review, intellectual property, copyright law, content creation and cultural production that were established pre-internet. To this end it contains a number of contributions that engage with the philosophy of internet piracy, as well as the emergence out of peer-to-peer file sharing networks of actual social movements.”
Pirate Philosophy p2p ver2.0’ is available at http://www.mininova.org/tor/2620411
Excerpts
Piracy as a Business Force
Source: Piracy as a Business Force, Adrian Johns
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)
Piracy as a Sovereign Force
Source: For the Good of the Net: The Pirate Bay as a Strategic Sovereign, Jonas Andersson
Jonas Andersson:
"In this essay I will argue that as peer-to-peer (p2p)-based file-sharing increasingly becomes the norm for media acquisition among the general Internet public, entities such as The Pirate Bay and associated quasi-institutional entities such as Piratbyrån, Zeropaid, TorrentFreak, etc. have begun to appear less as a reactive force (i.e. ‘breaking the rules’) and more as a proactive one (‘setting the rules’). In providing platforms for sharing and for voicing dissent towards the established entertainment industry, the increasing autonomy gained by these piratical actors becomes more akin to the concept of ‘positive liberty’ than to a purely ‘negative,’ reactive one.1 Rather than complain about the conservatism of established forms of distribution they simply create new, alternative ones. Entities such as The Pirate Bay can thus be said to have effectively had the ‘upper hand’ in the conflict over the future of copyright and digital distribution. They increasingly set the terms with regard to establishing not only technical protocols for distribution but also codes of behaviour and discursive norms. The entertainment industry is then forced to react to these terms. In this sense, the likes of The Pirate Bay become – in the language of French philosopher Michel de Certeau (1984) – strategic rather than tactical. With this, however, comes the added problem of becoming exposed by their opponents as visible perpetrators of particular acts. The strategic sovereignty of sites such as The Pirate Bay makes them appear to be the reason for the wider change in media distribution, not just an incidental side-effect of it.
My central focus was on how Swedish file-sharers justified their activities in the light of this current ‘copyfight’ polarization; i.e. how the discourses of pro-file-sharing sites, forums, and blogs, as well as the discourses of the file-sharers I interviewed seemed to rely on a number of specific, largely consensual understandings of the nature of digital content, the nature of digitally mediated consumption and the nature of the actors involved. Among these file-sharers, illicitly downloaded content was the norm rather than the exception. According to my observations, p2p-based file-sharing is now so widespread in Sweden that the collective in question are beginning to make up a population quite similar to the ‘conventional’ music and movie audiences. Hence, what will be presented below as the common activist bias in much of the mainstream ‘copyleft’ literature might serve to overstate the radicalism of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that the file-sharing structures remain uniquely interactive and collaborative, considering that they are in many ways akin to the current ‘Web 2.0’ paradigm (a paradigm which stresses openness, interactivity and reliance on free, user-generated content). They thus have the potential to serve as facilitators for anyone to become an occasional activist. Further, any act of consumption that currently makes use of these infrastructures is often deemed by the entertainment industry and its allied lawmakers to be transgressive, or activist-like, by virtue of the perceived sheer illegality of the phenomenon. The phenomenon thus becomes politicized, not so much by the file-sharers’ own intent, but by the potentialities inherent in the technology in its current legal and economical context, and the ways these potentialities are strategically employed by the people administering the actual infrastructures, such as the administrators behind The Pirate Bay.
...
Once an adversary of a conflict has control of the ontological definition of terms, his/her agency in translating the world into strategically expedient discourse is significantly improved. Normative statements such as ‘information wants to be free’ (the hacker call-to-arms from the 1980s which remains valid for today’s free content movements), or ‘sharing is caring’ (cf. Linde, 2006) entail an ‘act of purification’ (Latour, 1993) which serves to elicit certain understandings of the phenomenon at hand, highlighting positive externalities and discarding negative ones.
If we can link the notion of establishing such ‘strategic sovereigns’ with the politics of the everyday and with the processes by which this form of politics becomes part of the official doctrine that becomes expressed in the public debate and lawmaking practices, new possibilities for a more progressive understanding of file-sharing will be made possible.
The non-commercial aspect of the activist bias risks overstating the alleged altruism of file-sharing and is clearly at odds with the actual capitalist appropriation of p2p infrastructures that is currently seen with entities such as The Pirate Bay. Indeed, a more useful way to characterize the situation would be to regard p2p-based file-sharing as a vital part of the radically increased media convergence that is taking place due to the rapid digitization of consumption, production and distribution. Convergence brings about multiple ways of accessing media content and ‘ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture,’ Jenkins argues (2006: 243). With the entirely digital modes of consumption and distribution that we see on the Internet, both legal and illegal, the roles of consumer and producer are blurred and occasionally clash, as media consumers become more like participants and co-creators of trans-media narratives, infrastructures and communities, and traditional media producers try to harness this participatory agency. The argument is congruent with Chris Anderson’s concept of a ‘long tail’ of accessible media back catalogues (Anderson, 2006), which assumes a savvy media consumer actively seeking out content and recommending it to peers.
One central aspect of the multifaceted term ‘piracy’ is the way it works as a positive affirmation of this renewed user agency. Drawing on the ‘piratology’ of Armin Medosch (2003), piracy becomes visualized as an Open Source-based, productive response to the neo-liberal hegemony of the cultural industries. Along with its countercultural connotations and romantic aura of dissent, ‘piracy’ here invokes positive liberty: freedom to rather than the negative freedom from.5 It is a means to assert one’s autonomy, a way of becoming proactive (strategic) rather than reactive (tactical). Piracy here defines the ability to make one’s own destiny, to open the black box of technology and utilize it for one’s own ends – while doing this in the open, even forming part of the ‘mainstream.’ It also evokes the redistribution of widely popular as well as obscure content and doing this through highly public forums.
The Pirate Bay is in this sense not only an institutional, collective actor of the pro-file-sharing copyleft; it is as tangible and visible as such an actor can currently become. It is vocal in its dissent against copyright stakeholders, and it is accumulating a superabundance of links to content and daily visitors. Its status among the many similar indexing sites in the BitTorrent ecosystem is significant, in a large part thanks to its decisive manifestation as a brand." (http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/346/359)
More Information
- Introduction to Pirate Philosophy. Gary Hall
- ‘Pirate Philosophy Version 2.0: Open Access, Open Editing, Free Content, Free/Libre/Open Media’, search the Mininova torrent directory for ‘Pirate Philosophy p2p ver2.0’, or just go directly to: go to http://www.mininova.org/tor/2620411.
- Piracy as Business Force. Adrian Johns