Pirate Autonomy 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? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own." - Eben Moglen, the DotCommunist Manifesto

Eben Quote from DotCommunist Manifesto

"......intellectual property and its conceptual neighbors may bear the same relationship to the information society as the wage-labour nexus did to the industrial manufacturing society of the 1900s." James Boyle

1. Attack on Dystiopianism 2. Dark net quote 3. Quote from Report on P2P 4. Availability of criminal sanctions against non-commercial users since the NET. 5. Agenda for the FTAA.

"Having redefined IP as a trade issue and exhausted the immediate opportunities presented by the GATT, knowledge industries and the US government then moved policy back to WIP where the level of protection was once again ratcheted up in two treaties in 1996 (The World Copyright Treaty and the World Performers and Phonographs Treaty). Even this event however witnessed a steeling of developing countries position and the end of the multilateral trojan horse was nigh. Fused with frustration at the refusal by many states to go beyond formal compliance with TRIPS (leading arch-lobbyist and former head of the US Patents and trademarks Office, Bruce Lehman, to baldly state "TRIPS has been a terrible failure") the US has returned once again to coercive bilateral deals, whose ideal protectionist template is provided by the recent Free Trade Agreement with Singapore. For many accustomed to the association of the WTO with satanic acts, it is urgent to understand that the place of the game has changed.

P2P As many readers will be aware, the RIAA finally filed civil charges against 261 users of p2p systems last monday, after having sub-poenaed personal information on about 2000 users in recent months. Whilst the identities of many of the defendants remain unknown to the public, it is confirmed that they include a 67 year old man from Texas, and a 12 year old girld from New York city named Barbara ? - understandably she has decided to settle her case, paying $3.000 to the RIAA.

This wave of prosecutions arises in the same week when the RIAA offered an amnesty to those willing to publically confess and atone for their sins. Such a rapid escalation can only be understood as evidence of mounting desperation amongst major music owners in the face of a file-sharing population now numbering up to two hundred million by some estimates. This legal vilification and desire for an exhibition of public-shaming however is but a simulation of control; the heterogeneity of p2p networks, the complexity of jurisdictional issues, and the constant refinement of the technology itself spells doom for the RIAA in their battle against sharing. Indeed, the most immediate consequence of the current onslaught is a renewed interest and development effort to safeguard user privacy against the hostile data-trawling conducted by copyright owners. Ironically the current debacle offers probably the most fertile ground for the emergence of new clients to challenge market incumbents like Kazaa and iMesh, as users shop around and compare the relative levels of protection on offer.

All of the actions currently underway are civil suits for compensation and it is noteworthy that the criminal provisions of the No Electronic Theft Act have not yet been brought into the fray. Jeffrey Gerard Levy - then a 22 year old student at the University of Oregon - was the first person charged under this act in 1999, for making available music and copyright images from his website. Copyright infringement under the NET becomes a felony once the value of the copyrighted works infringed exceeds $2,500. Levy pled guilty and received a non-custodial sentence. The RIAA understood long ago that public reaction to this most recent move would be hostile and this likely explains why the criminal provisions have not been invoked. Furthermore criminal prosecutions are the province of state action, and would require strong support from the FBI's 'cybercrime' division and a district attorney willing to commit political suicide and initiate charges. Nonetheless, criminal actions can be expected in the near future: the inability to close the networks down will lead to the utter jettisoning of reason and desperate attempts to impose order through the prospect of jail.

Within the RIAA there appear to be different and clashing views. In November 2001, Cary Sherman contrasted the 'reasonable' approach of the music industry to that of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) who have had no compunction about going after individuals: ""Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," said Cary Sherman, the RIAA's president. "But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action. "

Now that claim lies dead as a dodo. Some players undoubtedly find the idea of attacking their customers distasteful, but the exhaustion of other avenues has obviously put to bed these doubts. The failure of legal action against Morpheus earlier this year may have been the turning point. The District Court determined that distributed file and search systems were not liable for their users activity in the same way that Napster had been determined to be. Napster used a centralized server so as to establish the initial contact between its users, giving the site's owners considerable control over their behaviour. Subsequent generations of p2p clients have not repeated this mistake (by and large). With this decision (currently on appeal) the offensive against p2p developers as a point of potential vulnerability has faded. Thus a new figure was required between the industry's cross-hairs - the individual.

The coming moths will be crucial. Targeting the 'content-owners' with protest, propaganda and boycotts is fundamental - passivity could lead to the slow erosion of the sharing community if people are individualized for victimization and go to their fate alone. Groups such as the EFF and boycottRIAA.com already offer a campaign infrastructure into which some people may wish to invest their energies, but there are lots of other opportunities and methods of creative action.

push in the standards bodies threaten legislation so as to accelerate the adoption process (CBDTA - FCC, felony circumvention)

- Negative experience during the 1980s with dongles - Defeat of SDMI/CSS - Broadcast Flag for digital tv transmissions - Complex role of hardware manufacturers: ensure exceptions for themselves, relegate consumer interests, interoperability - Videogame lock-out; Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc. and Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America - Innovation/value addition v barriers to entry - Sklyarov, elcomsoft, adobe ebooks - Microsoft DRM hack

Decommodification

1. The new field of production 2. China/Korea, Munich, Brazil. 3. BBC archive project 4. Strangulation of proposed conference on open-collaboration to be hosted by WIPO. 2. Controversy over WIPO meeting on FLOSS 2a. Aggressive posture adopted by the uS State Department on orders of copyright industry 2b. Meanwhile announcements about Munich and Brazil 2c Software Patents Directive 2d Litigation commence against P2p users Microsoft had threatened to boycot WSIS if "Open Source" was so much as mentioned in the WSIS Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action.

The non-rivalrous nature of information -- use by one doesn't diminish availability to another – network-driven decline in communications cost, and cheap commodity hardware enable new realms of cooperation where human labour is central. GNU/Linux, Kuro5hin, Indymedia, SETI, and filesharing networks such as eDonkey and Kazaa are just a few of the outcomes of this protean productive force composed through the voluntary cooperation of network prod-users. A key benefit of the peer-based production model limned above is that volunteer labour goes where it is most competent -- bypassing the inefficiencies of task allocation through firms or price signals -- and goes only where it's willing. Such spaces of free association constitute a significant terrain of individual freedom. Although this voluntary labour and its fruits are partially appropriated by capitalism, these practices are nonetheless concrete experiences of self-valorization, where participants appropriate the tools and knowledge of production and employ them to their own ends in a sort of triumph of use over exchange. Intellectual property laws limit or attempt to crush the potential of this mode of production by narrowing the range of inputs available to be refined or repurposed by all. "

- externalities positive and negative, capturing imagination, exploiting sociality, subjectivity, cooperation, creativity. Life-long learning, perpetual serviude tot he demands of the capitalist labour market. - affective labour “What is prescribed is subjectivity, that is to say, precisely that which only the operator can produce by ‘’giving themselves”” to the task. The impossible to command qualities that are expected from her are discernment, the capacity to confront the unexpected, to identify and resolve problems (Gorz, 16). Physical production becomes subaltern to the affective moment, the ‘’service’’, the research and development behind the product - shift in nature of the workspace from one of forced and often violent discipline (factory model) to the bringing of culture inside the production process.

1. Antechamber to a real appropriation. 2. Workshop for the transmission of knowledges. 3. Willingness to tolerate certain level of piracy as means of market construction and increasingly to hinder the expansion of free software.

1. Why do we bang on about infrastructures? It’s the substance that counts. Limitations of autonomous media systems, centrality of the new proletariat. 2. Confronting the media systems in their entirety. Those building a transformative media apparatus are not media-activists but rather a paradigmatic figure of the new workforce, precarious, mobile, multi-skilled. The Sky broadcast team is a mirror of the media activist. 3. Inability to establish a sustainable funding model lies has historically spelt out the destiny of transformative communications initiatives. Clearest in newspapers (Liberation, Tageszeitung, Village Voice) but also manifested in physical spaces close to political agitation; the familiar story of the squat or social center that signs a contract and five years later has no meaningful substance at all, existing merely so as to produce a wage for those determined enough to persevere, ekeing out an exploitation of past feats with the occasional artiistic retrospective of its radical origins.

1. What happens to the public in noddy-noddy land? Their focus would move away from commercial considerations to providing "public value", he said. "I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion. "In particular, it will be about how public money can be combined with new digital technologies to transform everyone's lives." 2. How do the discourses that seek to reinforce the public state and authoritarian scaremongering of the security pandemic coincide?

Why go to Geneva 1. Constuitutive moment share skills 2. relaunch a discussion outside of the pattern of summit-hopping 3. experiment with decentralized mode of organizing 4. capitalize on public attention to raise consciousness aropund issues such as IP/precarity 5. Access to communications workers outside of the west 3-400 delegates related to cris, 8-10,000 delegates for summit

The sadness of the WSIS 1. Refusal to establish separate fund to finance digital divide program. 2. Today, 16th July, a governmental sub-group constituted of the governments of China, Egypt, Canada, Mexico, San Salvador and the USA was formed to look at issues of Human Rights, the “Right to Communicate” and Cultural Rights. Egypt blocked a European proposition to introduce a freedom to communicate. China, presumably, is responsible for the exclusion of HRIC. Opposition to Libya's role in the Human Rights trade led to the exclusion of RSF. 3. Concentration: US, Italy 4. Bureaucratic obstacles to registration etc. 5. CS to draft their own declaration out of exasperation with official process 6. Militant position of CCBI 7. Instrumentalization of digital divide discourse: No conflict then with programs such as the recently launched 'Digital Freedom Initiative' administered by USAID with their 'partners' Cisco and Hewlett Packard, guided by the approach outlined by Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans: ""Our solution is free enterprise and free markets. We know that the miracle of capitalism is that in an environment of free enterprise the spirit of competition takes hold, leading to more innovation, which leads to economic growth, which leads to higher standards of living, which leads to quality of life, which leads to a world that lives peace and prosperity."

David Carney, Bush Administration Announces Digital Freedom Initiative http://www.techlawjournal.com/topstories/2003/20030304.asp

Enabled by the dramatic decline in price of powerful computational devices, information processing has transformed every area of work: from the PDA-equipped waitress taking her orders, to real-time tracking of dockers track as they move pallets on quaysides or in warehouses. Nothing escapes the suction towards capillary monitoring, modeling, integration into workflow and inventory management. Incumbent businesses strive to appropriate these gains wherever possible, as a new mode of production emerges, child of the precipitous reduction in the cost of computation power, the transaction costs of communications. This protean productive force is composed of the voluntary cooperation of network prod-users.

The Mad Stuff "School children should recognize their own creativity by including the copyright symbol on their course work."

According to the Patent Office's director of copyright, Anthony Murphy, a major proponent of the new program, understanding intellectual property carries important social value: "By bringing awareness of the importance of copyright into our schools, tomorrow's consumers can take their place in a community which understands, values and respects intellectual property." http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/16/abc_ip/print.html

Ten Theses on Freedom of Communication and Freedom of Movement

1. Two great transformative productive forces.

2. In both instances evasion or resistance to the laws takes place upon a mass level that feels no need to articulate itself politically. Mass illegality is the practice of emancipation.

3. Both require the erection of legal borders and their imposition.

4. Both increasingly tend towards a police response.

5. In both management is introduced as a euphemism for control and surveillance - governmentality

6. In each the prohibition is ambivalent: the need for labour creates a demand for migrants. The IOM actively recruits specific type of workers as well as deporting others. Security firms need hackers. Software companies need pirate copies in circulation. Porosity.

7. At the level of migrant subsistence there is a direct correlation in many cases; wherever the labour market is tight the migrant community depends on infringing or grey goods in order to eke out a living.

8. As the key determinant in productive capacity IP restrictions are central to the hindering of national industrial development and consequently an individual's capability to subsist where they are born. IP laws now help to fashion the flow of immigration from the labour intensive areas of the world to the profit centers.

9. In both areas there is a tendency towards a kind of feudalism; under feudalism labour was tied to land, migration controls execute such a function negatively by excluding migrants from the desired land. Trade secret laws achieve the same thing in terms of restricting the portability of knowledge, tying it to a particular workplace to the worker's detriment.

10. Illegal migrants, 'border-hackers', breach social laws by going where they ought not be. Their assault on the reining lies in this symbolic disordering as well as their material reality. Hackers themselves first penetrate at this symbolic level, although there can be material costs coincident to this.

11. Long before the emergence of mass media, migrants, pirates, soldiers, slaves were the conduit of information through which knowledge of struggles circulated. The movement of people and the movement of radical ideas have always been inseparable, driven by disaster, repression, agitation. Migrant communities, forced to operate in clandestinity make continued use of these exact informational structures. On the other hand to interpret the progress of free software as a sign of a general obsolescence of the need to fight around IP strikes me as simplistic. The threat of jail for p2p users and the reality of death for millions in need of patented medicines are very real.Whilst the former may function as something similar to a migrant's risk of ending up in a detention center - a risk, but not the controlling factor of migrant action or subjectivity - by performing legal vilification on an individual as a simulacrum of control and management. The complexities of modern life and the basic conditions for modern production do not however enable the realization of such power fantasies. Instead we get the totalitarian state show five days a week after the news at lunchtime, repeated again at 6.30. The potential danger in this display lies in tis capacity to straightjacket the social appropriation of technology, in such a way as to keep the model of exploitation central to media-marketing-news companies alive. This is why the struggles around IP should not be foremost about consumption, but production, social relationships and the collapsing of the distinction between user and producer. In this light there is nothing 'moralistic' about 'sharing' – it is t pragmatic mode of exchange commensurate to the form of social relation proper to that nebulous movement now touted as the 'commons'.

Key Terms: Role of research in agitation. For a European Inquiry into Information and Communications Production.

Time Bandits against the Gangsters of Accumulation: access to the means to life remains contingent on mostly unnecessary production whose only purpose is to reproduce the cycle of accumulation and continue the class war waged from above.

Criminal Mass: strategies against the of Criminalization of sharing of, and access, to knowledge.

Pirate Pride Parade: to coincide with the Genevan festival, a parade through the streets, culminating in a concert and rave.

Copyriot.Fightsharing.Dealers for life.Outlaw Broadcasters.Highwaymen of the net.Global Syndicate. What's the point of robbery when there's nothing left worth stealing? Evil genius for a better tomorrow.Illegal bodies

Crackpipe Neoliberalism

What are the moments represented by these themes?

Communication and movement from below are two of the strongest forces fashioning our everyday lives in ways which are not controlled and commanded by the state. No accident that the same paradigm, management, involving in one case demographic survey and in the other personal profiling based on informational inputs, is applied to both. Both are defined as problems; both have generated mass practices of illegality which the institutions given sovereignty over these jurisdictions can only simulate control over; both are central to the reproduction of the economy and profit on the terms now defined.

Movement from above mostly expresses itself in the movement of capital over borders and industries, the effortless economic blossoming and withering of regions. But it is also the summit-hoping by those who would be kings, and the fairytale lifestyle of the media celebrity or business magnate who flies to Venice for dinner and London for his tailor. Communication from above is the engineering of opinion, the manufacturing of the subject as consumer, the predatory generation of the fear of the other, the evacuation of sense and the bending of the knee before neo-feudalisms (old) new aristocracy.

Where we can be and what we know determine the parameters of what we can do. But in this world at the end of each trail lies the mad demands of production and the morality of the job. Work was always ugly but becomes even more undignified under informational capitalism, accelerated, intrusive, destabilising and omnipresent. Whether its selling the self in 'services' or the demand to turn-over a hundred 'customer inquiries' an hour in a call center, the means of accessing an income are locked to the use of the wage as a means of social control and the demand to extract surplus value from one and all. There is labour from below, but alas it doesn't tend to produce income, unless we're talking about that activity dubbed criminal, whose repression comprises one of the few outstanding justifications for its own existence that kingpins of the state apparatus appear to invest their faith in.

When the majority of profit extracted from commerce derives from the design, idea and research behind the good rather than the physical artifact itself, and when the manufacture of these physical containers can be subjected to a devestating dose of comparative advantage as demonstrated in the market for labour, then intellectual property rules become the fundamental vectors for control and the reproduction of profit-centers. In a world without borders these rules ensure that each keep their proper place, injecting a certain social order. Meanwhile, the networked millions, discovering the scale of their capacity in collaborative production from below using informational inputs, find their practice of building outside of profit impeded by rules erected so as to limit access, prevent the emergence of alternatives capable of challenging the rentier's racket and deny access to knowledge. These laws bind the arms of workers in the labour market as well, block the portability of skills, know-how, and of course, alienating us from the products of our work

References: Solo, Trashing Free Software Jacques Godbout Killbarda’s article Sasha Constanza Chock Yochai, Coase’’s Penguin. Kuda Rossiter 1. BBC Announcement about archives http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3177479.stm HRIC http://iso.hrichina.org/iso/news_item.adp?news_id=1527 Telestreet, Gurriglia Marketing, Link to my article RSF http://www.rsf.fr/article.php3?id_article=797215.09.2003 http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/im/content_themes/contributions/ccbi.doc ]. Cptech artcile on compulsory licensing and FTAA. Conrad’’s article on FTAA.

i. The User Insurgency

(a) As Critique of property

There is a more precise connection between this mass 'criminality' and the merging productive power; the desire to obtain media commodities for free is a powerful motivation for self-education the acquisition of new skills and knowledge: how to use cryptographic hashes, compression techniques, wider knowledge of less-charted (and thus safer) network spaces, familiarity with formats and the ability to render digital forms as physical objects such as mastered CDs and DVDs, familiarity with publishing techniques, wikis etc. File-sharing forums function as veritable apprentice-yards for the diffusion of techniques which once acquired are portable to uses outside of the reproduction of the commodity circuit.

(b) As Productive Force

"But the worker, as owner and seller of his labour-power, enters into relation with capital only as an individual; cooperation, the mutual relationship between workers,only begins with the labour process, but by then they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labour process they are incorporated into capital. As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital. Hence the productive power developed by the worker socially is the productive power of capital." Panzieri

Critical interpretations of automation earmark the introduction of technology as either a reaction to the militancy of or, or an attack on, workers activity. This is sometimes described as the increasing role played by constant capital (investments, machinery) with respect to variable capital (labour). The worker is deskilled as the intelligence formerly drawn from living labour is invested in the machinery itself, the producer ceases to be the subject of production and becomes supervisor of a machine that has taken her place. In some cases the introduction of technology will result in unemployment whose disastrous consequences can be seen in a thousand former industrial towns turned wastelands.

P2P reverses this situation at least in part. As the range of its productive practices grow it substructs tasks from the market and the firm. Instead of 'management' or 'planning' these projects rely upon horizontal negotiation, modular production and exploits the ease and cheap nature of digital communications to overcome the need for a centrally located decision-maker, formerly known as the boss. Widespread social cooperation need longer be constrained to the firm - this is the fundamental change of peer to peer. Distinguishing this practice from real-world volunteerism are the low costs of coordination, the role of information (and its especial public good characteristics) as both raw material and output of the productive process and the access to a near infinite range of expertise and paralellizable workers through the network.

No objections to the creation of value per se.

Produces a decline in the level of political dependence.

(c) The Dark Side of the Collaborative Mode

ii. Response of the State

iii. Response of existing market incumbents

ii. Deregulation of the media

iii. We want the machines to work for us. To improve the standard of living whilst abolishing monotonous, labour.

Assessing the effects of technological innovation between potential productivity and real-world effect allows us to shine light on the social consequences at the level of distribution of wealth and crucially power, rather than fetichizing innovation in and of itself.

"The working-class struggle thus presents itself as the necessity of global opposition to the capitalist plan, where the fundamental factor is awareness -- let us call it dialectical awareness -- of the unity of the 'technical' and 'despotic' moments in the present organization of production. The relationship of revolutionary action to technological 'rationality' is to 'comprehend' it, but not in order to acknowledge and exalt it, rather in order to subject it to a new use: to the socialist use of machines .30" Panzieri

Caffentzis essay commentary

In the master's mind, "the machinery and his monopoly of it are inseparably united"12 Panzieri

iv. Freedom to be where we want and do what we like

"In fact, for Marx, free time for the free mental and social activity of individuals by no means simply coincides with the reduction of the 'working day'. It presupposes a radical transformation of the conditions of human labour, the abolition of wage labour and the "social regulation of the labour process" In other words, it presupposes the total overthrow of the capitalist relationship between despotism and rationality, for the formation of a society administered by free producers, in, which-with the abolition of production for the sake of production-planned development, the plan itself, rationality and technology would be subjected to the; permanent control of social forces, and work would thus (and only thus) be capable of becoming man's 'vital need'."

Difference between opposition within the accumulation mechanism and that at the level of the social relation of power that lies at the heart of the system as a whole.

‘ An important meaning of liberation with continuities to the Revolution of 1640 is suggested in the first chapter: namely the growing propensity, skill and success of London working people in escaping from the newly created institutions that were designed to discipline people by closing them in. This tendency I have dubbed 'excarceration' because I wish to draw attention to the activity of freedom in contrast to its ideological or theoretical expressions. I see that activity as a counter-tendency to a recent historiographical trend exemplified by Michel Foucault, who stresses incarceration in the 'the great confinement' and who makes rulers of government and society seem all-powerful.' Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p.3

v. Strategy "The tendential line that can be identified objectively as a valid hypothesis/guide lies in the strengthening and expansion of self--management demands. Since self-management demands are not posed merely as demands for 'cognitive' participation, but affect the concrete relationship rationalization/hierarchy/power, they do not remain closed within the ambit of the firm. Instead, they are precisely directed against the 'despotism' which capital projects and exercises over society as a whole, at all levels, and they are expressed as the need for a total overthrow of the system, by means of a global prise de conscience and a general struggle of the working class as such."

fn41: The representation of communist society as a society of 'abundance' of goods (even if not purely material ones) and of 'free time' is widespread in Soviet ideology, and is obviously the result of denying any effective social regulation of the labour process. 'Technological' illusions intervene today to sustain such ideology; for example, in R. Strumilin (On the Road to Communism, Moscow 1959), 'directing functions in the processes of production' are identified with 'technical' control, with the 'higher intellectual content' of work made possible by the "development of technology with its miraculous automatic mechanisms and electronic machines that 'think' ". Thus, automation will make it possible to achieve a really 'affluent' society of consumers of 'free time'; see above, note 30! As an example of typical deformation of Marx's texts on this point, see G. Friedmann, Industrial Society, New York 1955, where the worker's reappropriation of the product and of the content of work itself is identified with 'psychic-physiological control of work'!

6. Obscuring of labour, technical, comparison with housework etc.

7. “The reason we’re so downbeat is we think the peer-to-peer problem is going to only get worse. In 2008, broadband will be prevalent around the world,” said Simon Dyson, the report’s author.

It's funny how in the beggining all you wanted was to get that X item (song/game/app etc) and ended up joining and participating in very nice comunities. You laugh you learn and you meet ppl all over the world which otherwise you would never have met.

lol .... for me one of the great staisfactions of this internet age is seeing those two words together... "Download Complete" eh eh eh (how sad am I?) No really ppl begin with filesharing then they learn about routers then network connection... the possibilities are endless (you even begin to unravel the mistery of the smurfs.... which I only begin to compreend...) June 20, 2003 p2pforums.com

Chris Gregory "Gifts and Commodities", Ongka's Big Moka Ongka: A Self Account by a PNG Highlands Big Man by Andrew Strathern Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, starting with the second book. There are also elaborations on an eco-economy, too, and hydrogen economies. Vonnegut mauled the gadget genre with Player Piano.

- difference between ‘’gift exchange and direct reciprocity’’ - http://struggle.net/Ben - MIYACHI TATSUO - Germna Ideology, Feuerbach - indignity of work breeds the desire and readiness to produce elsewhere for free, in conditions of dignity