The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism by Durand Rodolphe & Vergne Jean-Philippe

Author:Durand, Rodolphe & Vergne, Jean-Philippe [Durand, Rodolphe]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781422183182
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2012-11-13T06:00:00+00:00

Digital Economy, Cyberhackers, and Capitalism in the Third Millennium

Today, cyberpirates are opposing the normalization of data sharing and the monopolistic control of digital space. Many companies, especially from the music or film industries, defend their territory and therefore the exploitation of their property rights. In mid-January 2012, two important events marked the opposition between the two conceptions of information exchange on markets. The US Congress postponed the vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), promoted by many firms, whereas other organizations were demonstrating against this act. As the bill proposed to shut down sites within and outside US territory that contain any content protected by American intellectual property rights, opponents saw it as a prohibition to exchange cultural content freely on domains that belong to mankind in general and not to any particular territorial state. Wikipedia, which embodies this idea of digital common good, displayed a black home page and blocked access to its content for twenty-four hours in a move to protest against the act. About 160 million people worldwide saw the site’s banner that day. Google reported to have received 7 million signatures for a petition opposing the law.

The second event is the spectacular arrest of Kim Dotcom and the turning off of his company Megaupload. After Napster made peer-to-peer exchanges possible for music, Megaupload stirred things up with the diffusion of TV programs and films, centralizing content with and without legal protections and enabling streaming, questioning laws regarding intellectual property and the exchange of cultural content. Just as in the regular TV crime shows Megaupload stored in its servers, in the end the FBI stepped in to forcibly catch Kim Dotcom on the New Zealand island where he had found refuge. The FBI also seized the vessels of his computer-geek fleet. The Megaupload affair was seen by many as an act of compensation from the state toward the unsatisfied proponents of the SOPA, an indication that the sovereign state is firmly resolute in its intention to crack down on the organizations that unduly benefit from rights they do not own. Both events highlight the importance of continuously recoding the laws that govern intellectual property and the creation and distribution of cultural goods.

The actions of the pirate organization on the net take many forms. Pirates both create and distribute free software and content. They change the net in general. For example, a hacker was behind the invention of e-mail as a means to connect users of terminals in various locations. A researcher working on the Arpanet military communications project—the predecessor of the Internet—once discretely modified the source code of several software applications developed by the military research agency in 1971 in order to send the first e-mail remotely using the @ symbol “mainly because it seemed like an elegant idea.”6

The dream of an open digital world almost became a reality in the 1970s after a court ruled that AT&T (again!) was in violation of antitrust laws, which prohibited the company from selling UNIX software (the company agreed to terms but eventually started selling it again in 1982).

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