Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [269]
That would have lasting consequences. For as teenagers swapped mix tape compilations in London and poets competed with each other in Africa, in Northern California cassettes were being pressed into service to build a similar kind of community of recording, sharing, and copying. But the content that interested this communitywas intriguingly different. The first home computer hobbyists took the principles of home copying and applied them to digital data.
The word most often associated with piracy at the turn of the twenty-first century was probably software. Software piracy, an arcane concept before about 1975, became a ubiquitous one in that generation. In the press it rivaled and then subsumed the lamentations emanating from the entertainment industry about pirated music, movies, and books, as they came to be redefined as subspecies of software. With the growth of the Internet, fears of identity theft, phishing, and the like-culminating in spectacular feats like the pirate multinational NEC-merged with those of piracy proper to make problems of credit and authenticity central to the very constitution of a global "new economy."
By the late 197os, a fundamental fault line was emerging around digital creativity and intellectual property Digerati themselves disagreed profoundly about the place of property in the new digital realm, and as that realm became increasingly a networked one those disagreements metastasized. At one extreme, some pioneers urged that intellectual property be built into the very code structuring the networks. At the other, some advocated its abandonment as an anachronistic barrier to creativity and community. These positions cut across conventional political affiliations. As a result, polemics about piracy came to stand as proxies for fundamental convictions about the cultural, social, and technical character of the digital domain. Images of pirates, buccaneers, Robin Hoods, and the like that had permeated expert communities in programming from at least the i96os now took on a more serious tone as they opened a set of rifts between various proprietary regimes and some nonproprietary ones. The moral and practical realities of the digital realm evolved through the ensuing exchanges.
When contemporaries sought to understand what was happening in this transition, they often appealed to an ethos of antiproprietorial creativity that digital networks supposedly favored. That is, they sketched a cluster of morally consequential "norms" to which true digerati were supposedly committed-norms of sharing, access, and technocracy- and which characterized the emerging culture. The perspective made sense not only because it captured something about the technical properties of digital networks, but also because it evoked a widely believed account of the nature of true science. But that understanding, we have seen, was itself a consequence of mid-twentieth-century conflicts about patenting. Patent strategies in the telecommunications industries in particular had triggered the articulation of this normative account of science, which included a conviction that real research was ultimately incompatible with intellectual property What is more significant here, however, is that alongside what may loosely be called an ideological inheritance was a practical one. Two closely related kinds of "piratical" interloping had survived the contests of the 192 os-i95o s and would nowplay important roles in shaping the digital revolution. One was unlicensed radio. Amateur ("ham") transmission and reception remained a popular activity throughout the