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'