Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [272]
In the early 1970s phone explorers coalesced with a counterculture keen to make ostentatious gestures against the mainstream broadcasting and entertainment industries. The best-known declaration of war was perhaps that by the so-called Air Pirates, a group of San Francisco cartoonists who published skillfully rendered imitations of 1930s cartoons portraying Disney's icon taking drugs and having sex (the corporation pursued them so humorlessly that it provoked a backlash from another outfit calling itself the Mouse Liberation Front).4 In the same year, Abbie and Anita Hoffman's Youth International Party-the "Yippies"-seized upon phreaking as an ideal tool for aparallel effort. Not onlywould it help connect fellow Yippies together, they reasoned, but the practice itself suited their ambitions for media. Their point was that underground media must be a commons, with any organ free to reproduce the contents of any other. Hoffman's own guide for would-be revolutionaries, Steal This Book -published by "Pirate Editions" - advocated "outlaw" radio andTV stations, which should be linked through (unpaid) telephone lines to form a nationwide "people's network." They would form "the vanguard of the communications revolution." "One pirate picture on the sets inAmerika's living rooms is worth a thousand wasted words."5 To make this pirate revolution work, experts ("technical freaks") would be needed, and Hoffman recommended that readers find them in the world of amateur radio. He also directed them to Radical Software, a periodical emanating from a New York group of artists in the brand-new home-production medium of videotape. Operating oxymoronically as the Center for Decentralized Television, Radical Software was heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, and also by Norbert Wiener's antiproprietorial vision of information. The magazine proclaimed in the first lines of its first issue the imperative to universalize access to information, not least by abjuring copyright. It included what it called a"pirated" interviewwith Fuller, and invented a symbol to represent the "antithesis" of ©. The symbol was a circle containing an X (for Xerox). It meant "DO copy"6
Phreaking thus became a fixture of the counterculture. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers experimented with it (fig. 16.1). More than that, it promised to provide a means by which the counterculture might achieve two ends at once: it could counter mainstream media and achieve coherence in its own right. After all, what better way to combat Ma Bell's "improper control of the communication" than by merging phreakdom with the Yippies' characteristic combination of practical jokery and earnestness? Even as Steal This Book hit the streets, Hoffman and a New York phreak going by the pseudonym Al Bell began to publish a regular underground journal entitled The Party Line. Their intent was to proselytize about "the phone company's part in the war against the poor, the nonwhite, the non-conformist, and in general, against the people." In practice, each monthly issue was devoted to encouraging the mass adoption of phreaking. It twinned technical notes with screeds, reciting "Corporation ripoffs, establishment fucks, healthful hints, names and addresses of our friends who wish to be known, new services, new devices and plans for them." The journal endured for over a year until it was renamed TAP, for Technological American Party-or, later, Technological Assistance Program, apparently because banks refused to open accounts under the earlier name. It became