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?" - Eben Moglen, the DotCommunist Manifesto

In addition to severe commercial and social problems, the schemes [hardware based copy-control mechanisms] suffer from from several technical deficiencies, which, in the presence of an effective darknet, lead to their complete collapse. We conclude that such schemes are doomed to failure.”” Microsoft Engineers, The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution

Laws expanding the scope and duration of exclusive private rights in information (copyright, patent and trademarks and trade secrets) have been a constant since at least the late 1970s. Growing awareness of the consequences of this has produced a counter-movement in the last years, often rallying around notions of fair use, ‘a balance between public and private claims’ or information as a commons. Factual justification for such a movement is easily available but in the typical fashion of politics the point has been made hysterically, by caricature, so as to better illustrate the point. Thus the propagation of terms which convey events only as a movement of enclosure, commodification, information lockdown and the panoptical surveillance – a language of dystopia, hopelessness and victimhood. Such despondency would be legitimate if the promulgation of laws from on high was enough to control human behaviour and creativity; such a description is however false in several respects and risks being a self-fulfilling prophecy by fostering changes in social norms in flagrant contradiction with the law.

Everyone is an Enemy An estimated 150 million people are now using a diversity of p2p systems to shares music, video, software and text files on a regular basis. Competition within hardware manufacturing and broadband provider sectors is ensuring that access to the necessary commodities – storage space for media, transmission channels for delivery - expands. Copyright industry interests anticipated these developments on the basis of their observation of software piracy and Bulletin Board based media distribution in the late 80s and early 90s. One response was the introduction in the United States of the No Electronic Theft Act in 1997. Prior to NET copyright infringement was merely a civil offence if performed for non-commercial purposes but this law made non-profit distribution of copyright goods a criminal offense, or even a felony, once low thresholds of value and numbers of copies were exceeded. Jeffrey Gerard Levy, a college student in Oregon was the first to be tried under the new law - he pled ‘’guilty’’ of sharing texts and music from a site hosted on his university webserver. Subsequent legislation extended criminal sanctions to the development and distribution of tools devised to defeat ‘’digital rights management’’ technologies - technical measures integrated into media products to restrict their use. These devices, whose integration into hardware is demanded by the info-tainment complex, constitute the other thrust of the industry’s war against the wave of sharing between strangers.

A comparable introduction of criminal sanctions has occurred in the area of payTV. Since its inception in the early 80s there has been a battle between decryption-card hackers and companies such as Sky, DirectTV and Canal+. Tens of millions are using modified cards so as to evade payment of extortionate monthly subscription fees. Initially the industry pursued the commercial distributors of the cards, but as this failed they shifted their attention to users. The result is that it is now a criminal offence even to receive a decrypted programme in your home – also known as a ‘’conditional access service’’ – without the authorised card. Here as in p2p the focus of repression has shifted from commercial counterfeiting entrepreneurs to individual end-users to their machines and their homes. Once-docile consumers are now to be approached as enemies.

That is the story from above. Let us look instead, critical eyes open, from below.

Criminal Mass Heedless of their redefinition as criminals by the global media godfathers together with their crooked political friends, there are now an estimated six million people swapping media online at any given moment. The Recording Industry Association of America began their jihad with 261 legal actions against individuals in September, having encountered obstacles in their war against p2p software developers in the spring. Instead of turning off their computers and returning to shopping as usual, however, users’’ reaction was one of rage. Boycotts began. Vilification of media companies for their capitalist rapaciousness became a commonplace in innumerable forums. One of the victims of the RIAA attack, a 12 year old girl living in social housing in Brooklyn, received so many donations that she ended up making a profit despite having agreed a $3,000 settlement with the RIAA to persuade them to drop the case. A legal fund to coordinate and finance collective defence for p2p users was set up at the tellingly titled www.downhillbattle.com. Lastly, and most saliently, the sharing went on in defiance of the threat of individualized punishment, with decreases in the numbers on public networks balanced by an increase in those participating in semi-private spaces for exchange and distribution.

Likewise PayTV hacking continues unabated in both traditional and innovative forms. Sky Italia, launched in July and monopolist of the Italian satellite market, seek to use their control over premiership soccer so as to infiltrate every home with their annual six hundred Euro ransom. In response, pirate television operators in Rome connected a television equipped with an authorized card to a transmitter and rebroadcast the signal in the clear to whole districts of the city on several occasions this autumn. This exemplary action constituted a spectacular intervention into the popular imagination, responded to a real need and sense of identity felt by Romans and attacked the commercialization of popular culture using acts rather than words.

On the technical side every