[lbo-talk] Villains of All Nations

snit snat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Fri Aug 20 05:10:41 PDT 2004


http://oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5422

Before you speak of information pirates

by Andy Oram

People who casually use the term "piracy" to refer to the unauthorized

exchange of copyrighted music, movies, books, and software would gain

a deeper understanding of the terms they use by picking up the highly

readable book Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden

Age by Marcus Rediker. This recently released study (Beacon Press,

ISBN 0-8070-5024-5) describes the lives and political significance of

pirates at the period of their greatest growth during the early

eighteenth century.

Pirates, in Rediker's analysis, were more than just thieves. They

created an alternative way to regard work, society, and life's

pleasures in an economically and religiously repressive age.

By the eighteenth century, pirates--their ranks fortified by political

dissidents and utopian communalists--had created an on-board ethos of

democracy, sharing, and mutual insurance. (They created the earliest

social security system.) This is in contrast to the military and

trading ships of the day, ruled by absolutist captains who cheated

their staff, kept food and water rations criminally low, and freely

employed the whip.

The pirates treated people of all races equally, in contrast to the

racist practices of their opponents that reached its extreme in slave

trading. The pirates admitted women to their ranks and apparently were

sexually loose.

The pirates spoke consciously and articulately about the oppression of

sailors and others by the sinfully rich capitalists and traders of

their time, and refused to be placated by the religious platitudes of

such status-quo philosophers as Cotton Mather. (In fact, Cotton Mather

admitted to some extent that the pirates were right.)

Rediker does not prettify pirates. He says forthright they were not

just bandits and murderers but also terrorists--in the sense that they

used violence to create fear and bend others to their will. Still,

they possessed a sense of justice and chivalry that is usually missing

from modern military engagements.

Pirates were dissolute, destructive, and often drunk. But this

represented an excess of their basic vision of freedom: freedom from

masters, freedom from the fear of sin, freedom from hunger.

Is it difficult to find a common thread between the villification of

eighteenth-century pirates and the villification of people who trade

or illegally sell music, moves, books, and software today? Like the

old pirates, the information traders create a bounty from the work of

others (the artists and writers). But at the same time, they create a

new vision of information democracy that contrasts positively with the

control freaks and commercial cynicism of the mainstream media

conglomerates.

Information traders promote diversity, by allowing people to sample

dated and unusual works. In an age where radio stations and movie

studios bend their offerings to the profit-based goals of an

increasingly small number of owners, this is crucial. Information

traders also allow communities to form around works--something studios

would like to do but are usually too controlling and hidebound to

carry off.

Do information traders hurt the industry, as studios and software

manufacturers like to claim? Well, revenues for music and movies are

going down. But figuring out what lies behind that statistic is a

tough undertaking.

It could be--as many claim--that people aren't buying much because

studios are just suppressing innovation and desperately putting out

warmed-over imitations of the same lousy junk year after year.

It could also be--as others claim--that in a bad economy, people

aren't so willing to pay the inflated prices charged for the CDs and

movies.

Or it could be--as the studios claim--that people use shared or

illegally sold copies instead of paying their fair royalties. This

claim has to be weighed against a massive amount of anecdotal

evidence--such as everybody I've heard talk about their

downloading--that says people buy more CDs when they get a chance to

sample music online for free. Information traders therefore drive

forward the entertainment industry. Low-cost authorized music services

may eventually take advantage of this trend. But it's hard to imagine

any authorized service offering the wealth of obscure and challenging

works one can get from unauthorized networks.

In emerging economies, anyway, the main source of infringement is not

peer-to-peer downloading, but conventional copying and distribution.

This phenomenon should have been considered by music and movie

executives when digital media first emerged; anyone worth his

six-figure salary would have prepared a business case to deal with it.

Villians of All Nations, in showing the environment that created, and

was in turn created by, the illegal behavior of one generation,

provides much food for thought in our own age, whose direction is

increasingly dominated by a wide range of illegal behavior:

undocumented immigrants, squatting, drug dealing, arms smuggling,

money laundering, terrorism, and--yes--actual sea-based piracy. But in

particular, Villians of All Nations can deepen the debate around

unauthorized information trading.

"We're in a fucking stagmire."

--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list