Information Insurgency and Its Limits Self-determination of where and how we want to live, and ability to communicate those decisions, constitute the fundamental vectors of individual choice. Limitations on the exercise of the first are the stuff of migration regulation. The second is contingent on the information we have as to the life-choices available. Capacity to communicate beyond a micro-public is constrained by a legal infrastructure that has favored the development of a concentrated ownership of transmission and a system of property rights that denies the possibility of recycling the works of others whether to convey our argument or contest that of another.

Pirate Pride 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

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. DirectTV are currently threatening action against nearly 10,000 users in the US.

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. Despite the existence of the criminal provisions of the NET, they have yet to be employed

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.

Phantasmagora of Control: No Need to Feed the Machine In addition to severe commercial and social problems, the schemes [hardware based copy-control mechanisms] suffer 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

Technical schemes to foreclose redistribution have fared no better. CSS, the content scrambling system conceived to prevent the copying of DVDs was reverse engineered and the resulting program DeCSS provided the key to unlock a large portion of the divx files now available on the web. The Motion Picture Studios vengefully pursued a fifteen year old Norwegian, Jan Johansen, with criminal charges for which he was later cleared. Meanwhile Secure Digital Music Initiative wasted years of research and millions of dollars in an attempt to develop a control mechanism for digital music to no avail. A last prototype was profferred to researchers for testing and summarily cracked. In the aftermath, the SDMI attempted to silence researchers from discussing the techniques employed with threats of legal action under the DMCA, later retracted. Microsoftt’s DRM also yielded its secrets and flaws shortly after release. Finally, and most clamorously, a Russian programmer, Dimitri Sklyaraov, was arrested by the FBI before thousands of people at the hacker-meet DefCon in Las Vegas 2001. He had just delivered a presentation describing flaws in Adobe’s ebook encryption scheme that had allowed the his employers’, Elcomsoft to produce a program capable of circumventing all controls. Charged under the criminal provisions of the DMCA and imprisoned for six weeks in California, charges against Sklyarov were ultimately dropped, but not before a widespread campaign for his release had brought hacker IP activism onto the streets with self-organized demonstrations in 14 cities.

That the pursuit of total hardwired control has so far proved fruitless is not to say that this tendency will disappear. So long however as free software systems have machines on which they can function, users will always be able to control their behaviour and defeat all panoptical devices. This is the fundamental political battle that gives meaning to the free in ‘’free software.’’

In All Tomorrow’s Economies: the Emergence of the “Prod-User’’ Class and Decommodification The phenomenal success and complexity of the free software movement has inspired the study of its means for organizing co-operation and a search for other areas where this mode of production finds form. Examples have not been in short supply. At an infra-structural level they range from the self-organised storage transmission structures of file-sharing networks to the pooling of hardware resources in projects such as SETI. At the level of knowledge and information production there are projects such as Wikipedia (a volunteer build non-proprietary encyclopedia) and a slew of news and discussion sites (Kuro5hin and Indymedia) built on collaborative writing engines have become the de facto standard for the organization of opinion native to the web. Science and research too has benefited from the restless curiosity of the army of amateur collaborators.

Each of these projects demonstrate the advanced state of self-organized production in the networked environment, and its capacity to subtract goods and services from a free market model built on the market and the firm. Hopes that these examples augur a more equitable world rest on the particularity of informational public goods nature of immaterial resources: non-excludability and non-rivalrousness. The first means that the cost of the provision of a good is the same if it's produced for a limited number of people as for all. The second means that your ability to enjoy a given good does not impede my use of it at the same time.

P2P reverses this situation at least in part. As the range of its productive practices grow it substructs, or removes, tasks from the market and the firm. Instead of 'management' or 'planning' these projects rely upon horizontal negotiation, modular production and exploitation of the cheap and easy nature of digital communications to overcome the need for a centrally located decision-maker -- formerly known as the boss. Widespread social cooperation is no longer 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 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.

Qualification: Our Invisible Labour for Capital and State The fact that the fruits of this collaboration, like the warez in circulation on file-trading networks, are free does not mean that they sketch future liberation. Such a conclusion could only proceed from a naïve belief that capital accumulation only operates where there is a fee for access. Service and knowledge industries are based precisely on extracting value on the back of free or cheap access to a basic product.

Some degree of pirate circulation of media commodities, for example, is desirable from an accumulation perspective as it ensures that the profile of the film, song, software or game reaches a broader community. In software it means that young designers train themselves in using photoshop and quark express, programs which later in ‘’professional life’’ they will continue to use and will pay for licenses for, due to the inconvenience of learning alternatives. Similarly the Matrix may be downloaded and viewed for free but the public excitement will help to sell t-shirts, posters and a hundred other spin-offs. Counterband circulation in this sense can be the perfect accompaniment for the efforts now commonly made by companies to add allure to their products by integrating ‘’street-hip’’, enlisting scores of marketing and cool-hunting agencies to keep them close to their desired demographic.In a world where retail price has no relationship to the cost of physical production, every positive description of cultural objects participates in the creation of a market for sales of the product directly or some derivative thereof – the mobilization of our subjectivity in the profit-cycle.

Likewise the benefits of networked voluntary labour do not only accrue to the music-collectors, free software users/producers and humanity in general. State and commercial apparatus get their cut as well. Clear examples are the common practice amongst gaming companies of using enthusiastic players as ‘’guides’’ to help new enthusiasts find their way around the game, overcome cul-de-sacs created by bugs in the code, and generally create a sense of community. Effectively these guides provide, for free, customer service which otherwise the company itself would have to finance. What’s more this fact is baldly stated by games companies themselves. Elsewhere NASA operate volunteer projects that harness free labour for banal techno-scientific tasks formerly requiring the attention of PhDs. What are those people now working on? The next Manhattan project?

Further Excavating the Potential for Liberation: Excarceration “”An important meaning of liberation …. [is suggested]… the growing propensity, skill and success of …. 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.’’ – Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged

“”The street finds its own use for things”” – William Gibson

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, port-management, network architecture, search algorithms, 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.

Whilst much of current pirate sociality revolves around consumption, the proliferation of the necessary skills for digital production and distribution allow us to anticipate the possibility of a more contestatory appropriation. To paraphrase a feminist phrase of long ago, it’s the possibility of taking the master’s characters, cultural icons embedded in everyday sociality, and repurposing them to tell new stories and offer the possibility of organizing the world in a different way which seduces us. This is what Harry Cleaver elsewhere has referred to as self-valorization, or ‘’those aspects of struggle which went beyond mere resistance or negation…’. These practices of reappropriation that act in disregard to the law and the scoial relations that law fixes, “... the search for the future in the present, the identification of already existing activities which embody new, alternative forms of social cooperation and ways of being."

Today’s pirates can be tomorrow’s agents of transformation, authoring their, and our lives, anew.