The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism (11 page)

Software as Enclosure and the Freeware Ideal

Software has wormed its way into our lives. It determines, plans, and controls the behavior of computers, cars, and electronic devices of all kinds. Software organizes and controls our movements on roads and railways and in the air, the production and broadcasting of music via digital channels, the presentation of information using office suite software, the way in which plates are dried in a dishwasher, and automatic buy-and-sell market transactions. Software is a summary of replicable procedures within a coherent set of contexts in which specific tasks are to be performed. Software lets us carry out complex operations that do not specifically require human intervention. Software encloses code—a collection of instructions written in computer language. Different paths of code can be used to achieve the same outcome, just as different sentences can render the same meaning. However, once one of the many alternative coding schemes has been set in proprietary software, its content cannot be changed anymore and its use becomes confining.

Although most software is “customizable,” preprogrammed software is the standard, as it allows us to accomplish tasks as quickly as possible. For an entire community of individuals, proprietary software is a closed system that limits free expression. Think about the way in which a software application like PowerPoint has radically changed the running of organizations over the past twenty-five years. Many employees spend the bulk of their workdays writing, rereading, correcting, and editing PowerPoint presentations. They wind up thinking in terms of lists, bullet points, and subpoints: each idea is broken down into two or three chunks of information backed up by a recent example, a comical image, or a joke, while the presenter goes to great pains to ensure that the audience does not suffer “death by PowerPoint.”

Many groups of computer specialists have come together to form cyberpirate organizations. Their public cause is twofold: to denounce the reductionist and expressionless aspect of software; and to decode the highly profitable economic model of software producers by proposing free and accessible alternatives that can be enhanced by the community. Interestingly, Richard Stallman, the leader of the Free Software Foundation, explained once that exclusive property (most notably that related to software) “made pirates out of what would be merely good, helpful neighbors.”
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The Birth of the Cyberpirate Organization

In the 1970s, the first organizations of computer activists, such as the Homebrew Computer Club, did not involve “pirates,” so to speak; rather, these organizations were made up of computer buffs who were looking to improve existing equipment—they were “hackers.” There are important differences between cyberpirates and hackers. While cyberpirates aim to establish alternative norms in a digital territory, hackers merely tweak a technology’s purpose or function (typically, a bored hacker could try to build a satellite receiver out of a broken microwave oven).
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Unlike pirates, hackers do not attempt to formulate political, economic, or legal demands—they just want to have fun, enhance their technical skills, and gain peer recognition. Besides, hackers are interested in particular markets rather than territories, each of which can host multiple markets. For instance, cyberspace hosts markets for virtually any type of product, ranging from cookbooks to technical devices for lawnmowers or electric shavers. Often, the hacker is specialized in a particular type of device, such as satellite receivers. A pirate, on the other hand, seeks to modify the norms of cyberspace. Put simply, hackers tinker with technologies, while pirates influence the norms embedded in territories.

A recent study by Jarkko Moilanen showed that 90 percent of hackers have membership in a single “hackerspace,” providing evidence that hacking is an activity focused on specific products.
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Hacker Mitch Altman, for instance, has devoted the last decade of his life to the refinement of a one-button universal remote control used for turning off any television. The same study also demonstrated that hackers’ primary interest is in building new objects, typically by changing the functions of preexisting products. Roughly speaking, pirates could thus be seen as higher-order hackers. It is important to note, however, that many early cyberpirates started their career as hackers in the 1970s and that the careers of pirates begin in hacker communities.

Hackers in the 1970s were interested mainly in hardware, a term that refers to all hard components of a computer terminal (processor, motherboard, etc.). After the first computers were networked, the upheavals in the computer industry brought hope. Also, the most utopian dreamers among these pioneers were already picturing themselves in a world where information would become freely available to all, where everyone could communicate with everyone else, and where the computer would offer everyone the possibility of creative expression independent of the traditional capitalistic norms, large corporations, or the state. This dream would become true thanks to the proliferation of personal computers, facilitated by the discoveries of the Homebrew Computer Club, some members of which later became the first cyberpirates. Among the early members of the club was Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, who for a long time flew the pirate flag out in front of the company’s head office. In 1976, the club received a document accusing the members of illegally using the BASIC program—that is, using the software without authorization from its creator and without paying royalties. The author of this letter was Bill Gates, a savvy geek who was willing to push his peers to the fringes of a new territory.

The Dilemma of Digital Sovereignty

Opening proprietary software is not the only objective of cyberpirates. The creation of cyberspace prompted pirate organizations to fight against a new form of sovereign normalization. In the 1980s, network connections were the privilege of universities, government agencies, and pirate organizations that were thriving while fighting with the state. In 1988,
Phrack
, a widely distributed magazine among hackers that specialized in underground computing, published a list of pirate organizations found in the digital territory. The publication counted 131 in the United States. Some organizations had only a handful of members; others, dozens of apprentice pirates who, a decade later, would train a large part of the pirate contingent on how to operate on a large scale on the democratized net that had become available to the masses. The name of these organizations already brought to mind an aggressive stand toward the state and monopolistic companies in the telecommunications sector (e.g., Apple Mafia, Bell Shock Force, IBM Syndicate, NASA Elite, Phortune 500, OSS, The Administration, Anarchy Inc.). It goes without saying that the development of these organizations, in number and in size, was gaining ground with the development of computers and the interconnecting of PCs.

Pirates do not want the sovereign state to impose its control on cyberspace. John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” as a response to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which introduced anti-indecency measures to cyberspace that threatened freedom of speech. As Barlow put it, this new law “attempts to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria, where I have dined and heard colorful indecencies spoken by United States senators on every occasion I did. This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven’t the slightest idea who we are or where our conversation is being conducted. It is … as though ‘the illiterate could tell you what to read.’ Well, fuck them. Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be in our own defense.”
⁴

The American government considered the pirate phenomenon as enough of a serious threat to launch a vast repression campaign in 1990 called a
hacker crackdown
. The Secret Service and other agencies dismantled these organizations and prosecuted them for infringing on private property in an industry that had not yet defined its standards.
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One of the notable effects of this wave of searches and indictments was the politicization of the movement, including an emerging fringe that positioned itself in the wake of arrests as the defender of civil liberties. NGOs such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Software Foundation gained influence and today voice many concerns of the cyberpirate organizations. In August 2011, the pirate organization Anonymous launched a cyberattack on the San Francisco Rail Agency’s website after the Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the agency for restricting mobile communications on its train platforms in an attempt to thwart the coordination of a protest demonstration. Often, a noteworthy consequence of highly advertised antipiracy repression is the creation of a rebellious image for the pirate movement, which gradually encourages many more outsiders to join the cause.

This excerpt from a manifesto written by a member of the Legions of the Underground gives an idea of how a pirate organization envisions cyberspace:
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Another one got busted today

Not for what you would think

I nod my head in silence, yet I am crying inside

Another idea stolen

Another idea lost

Another advance defeated

…

I am not like you

I want to know where something comes from

I want to know how something works

…

I give you my ideas freely

You give me the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

I give you information security

You give me the Patriot Act

…

This madness has to stop

Information no longer wants to be free

Information IS free

…

You will never control what we say or think

You will never win against us all

In “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which appears on tens of thousands of websites, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains why state sovereignty cannot apply to digital territory:

You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear
.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions
.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions
.

… Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different
.

Clearly, the struggle between cyberpirates and the state is about which norms should govern cyberspace and who has the legitimacy to design them. This has become a global struggle, as the pirate organization in cyberspace now extends beyond the United States and Western Europe. It has proliferated into Eastern Europe, Asia, Australia, and Russia. Scott Henderson estimates that approximately 1 percent of regular Internet users are more or less linked to a pirate organization in China.
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Some pirate groups have tens of thousands of active members and sympathizers. The Berlin-based Chaos Computer Club (CCC), founded in 1981, defines itself as “a galactic community of life forms, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information.” As an organization, it strives “for an open, free, and neutral Internet, … respectful of anonymity, personal data and in favor of transparency.”
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Put differently, it strives for an Internet that would be a common good administered in a decentralized fashion by its own users. An Internet that would resemble extraterritorial digital waters.

Chapter Eleven

HACKING PROPERTY RIGHTS

The people who call them trolls are usually large, incumbent players that cross-license their patent portfolios with other incumbents to form a nice, cosy oligopoly. “Trolling” is the practice of interrupting that comfortable and predictably profitable arrangement. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for the incumbents at all when you look at it that way
.