by Matt Garite
The
libertarians say “information wants to be free,”1
so I’ll begin by plundering Marx: A specter is haunting capitalism—the specter
of piracy. All the powers of intellectual property law have entered into a holy
alliance to exorcise this specter: Congress and CEO, Microsoft and RIAA,
copyright protection agencies and designers of spyware. Weekly dispatches from
the technology sector incessantly invoke the presence of a phantom war between
multinationals and pirates unfolding in the shadows of the current War on
Terror. Trade groups like the International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI) repeatedly claim that musical piracy costs the recording
industry an estimated $4.3 billion in worldwide sales each year.2 But these are not discriminate attacks—
But perhaps
the most curious feature of this highly publicized legal clampdown has been the
concept of “piracy” itself. Commentators and journalists repeatedly accept the
entertainment industry’s figurative use of the term to frame popular debates
regarding the electronic exchange of images and sounds. Because it remains
discursively uncontested, this politically charged appropriation of piracy is
often unconsciously merged with and made to seem indistinct from the term’s
more literal, historically grounded definition as “robbery and depredation on
the sea, or by descent from the sea upon the coast, by persons not holding a
commission from an established civilized state” (Oxford English Dictionary). Of
course, figurative uses of piracy are nothing new. This most recent deployment
of the term draws upon a rich and complicated history of precedents, dating
back to the origins of English copyright law in the eighteenth century when
piracy was strategically annexed into the judicial vernacular in order to refer
to illegally manufactured copies of literary works. But this careful
repositioning of the sign is not without consequence: in all such cases, the
figure of the pirate is intended to bear within it the analogous trace of an
earlier meaning. For instance, when “piracy” is deployed by representatives of
the film and music industries in order to refer to “the appropriation or
reproduction of another’s work,” the term is simultaneously assumed to conjure
up by way of association the romantic but decidedly pejorative figure of the
seventeenth century sea pirate, stereotypically portrayed as a bloodthirsty
thief and a treacherous rogue in adventure novels like Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island. According to this
logic, college students downloading music in their dorm rooms are suddenly of a
pair with swarthy criminals bedecked in eye patches and trademark wooden legs.
And this, of course, all plays well to the interests of the multinationals. The
negative connotations attached to piracy have the effect of skewing public
opinion and limiting opportunities for the radical reappraisal of copyright
laws. Indeed, to the extent that the entertainment industry succeeds in
ensuring that its framing strategy goes unchallenged, popular discussions of
“piracy” cast an implicit shadow of guilt upon their subject.
But to the
industry’s dismay, the figure of the pirate is itself unstable. The
conglomerates that rule the entertainment industry have not secured a total monopoly on uses of this figure, despite their
increasingly monopolistic ownership of the means
by which those uses are disseminated. Popular demands for alternative (and
sometimes downright enthusiastic) images of piracy repeatedly exceed the
confines of the industry’s intent. Dominant mass cultural representations of
piracy are therefore always sites of concession and exchange, where the
entertainment industry seeks to gratify the potentially transgressive desires
of its consumers while maintaining its position of dominance. For example, even
as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) was launching its latest
campaign against piracy, MPAA member Walt Disney Pictures was raking in profits
with its recent summer blockbuster Pirates
of the Caribbean (2003), an amusing send-up of “Errol Flynn”-style
high-seas adventure films starring former teen heartthrob Johnny Depp as a
“good” pirate named Captain Jack Sparrow locked in struggle with an evil crew
of undead pirates who become skeletons when struck by moonlight.4 And the success of Pirates of the Caribbean is by no means an isolated phenomenon.
Pirates (or their ghosts) continue to haunt the seas of contemporary culture. A
random (and by no means comprehensive) survey of popular references to piracy
might include Hollywood films like The
Goonies (1985), Peter Pan (both
the animated Walt Disney version from 1953, as well as the live-action
Universal Pictures version from 2003), Walt Disney’s Treasure Planet (2002), Hook
(1991), The Princess Bride (1987), Cutthroat Island (1995), and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003),
along with the classic “Pirates of the Caribbean” rides at Disneyland and
Disneyworld, the tribes named after pirates like Drake and Morgan in the “Pearl
Islands” episodes of Survivor,
literary works like Empire of the
Senseless or Pussy, King of Pirates
by Kathy Acker, The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter, cyberpunk novels like Bruce
Sterling’s Islands in the Net, pirate
romance novels (a thriving subdivision of the historical romance genre, with
titles like Pirates of Desire, Thief of Hearts, A Pirate’s Pleasure, A
Pirate’s Love, My Lady Pirate, Pirate Bride, Master of Seduction, Velvet
Chains, and Across a Moonlit Sea),
pirate Halloween costumes, LEGO-brand pirate ships for children, contemporary
translations of Ancient Greek epics like The
Iliad and The Odyssey (since
Odysseus, after all, was nothing if not a pirate), and advertisements for Captain
Morgan Original Spiced Rum. The pirates depicted in these texts range anywhere
from bold and romantic swashbucklers to the most unsavory of scurvy wags.
Indeed, the bulk of these texts rely upon complicated, ambivalent imagery
rather than the absolute, one-dimensional logic of the pejorative model favored
by groups like the MPAA. And yet, as we shift to discussions of copyright and
intellectual property, this range of meanings is rarely kept in mind. Debates
regarding intellectual property are too often foreclosed as a result of the
pejorative model’s dominance. The pirate is consistently denounced as
criminally other in relation to the law, while the laws themselves are
perceived as beyond dispute. In other words, if piracy may be said to
constitute an attack on traditional property relations, then popular
discussions of piracy are selectively framed so as to ensure that the
legitimacy of property is always assumed as given. In response to this careful
circumscription of debate, my paper will attempt to resurrect an awareness of
the utopian potential of piracy by positioning both its historical and
contemporary manifestations in relation to ongoing processes of primitive
accumulation.
Robin
Blackburn conceives of primitive accumulation as an ongoing process in The Making of New World Slavery. He
quotes a passage from the first volume of Capital
where Marx writes, “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the
extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population
of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the
conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins,
are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.
These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation”
(Marx 915). Marx describes these events as the various historical preconditions
necessary for the transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production. He
focuses specifically on the enclosure of the English countryside during the
early modern period, when masses of peasants were violently driven from the
land and ownership of what had previously been communal property was
subsequently privatized and concentrated in the hands of an elite
proto-capitalist ruling class. For Marx then, the process of primitive
accumulation refers to an isolated series of historical events—mainly European
acts of conquest, enslavement, robbery and murder—all of which culminate in the
separation of laborers from their primary means of production. Blackburn
challenges this notion of primitive accumulation as a series of isolated
historical “moments,” describing it “not as an episode but as an on-going
aspect of the metropolitan accumulation process—what might be termed ‘extended
primitive accumulation’” (
But this is
not to say that piracy is simply one more way for capitalists to accumulate
resources and separate workers from the means of production. Capital
undoubtedly depends upon piratical acts of expropriation in order to reproduce
itself, but it must also paradoxically renounce or disown such acts. Thus, in
order to avoid a reductive one-to-one equation of piracy with primitive
accumulation, we must pause to acknowledge the way piracy doubles as both
capitalism and its other. In this sense, pirates bear an uncanny resemblance to
cannibals. In her essay “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Cannibalism,” Crystal Bartolovich argues that there are at least two conflicting
fears embodied by contemporary uses of the term “cannibal”: one concerning “a
dispersion and attendant excess of consumption,” and another obsessed with “a
failure of consumption” (Bartolovich 209). We can apply this claim to
contemporary uses of the term “piracy” by replacing “consumption” with
“accumulation.” In other words, the figure of the pirate emerges in discourse
to signal either an excess or a failure of “legitimate” modes of accumulation.
Piracy and cannibalism are sites where capitalism meets “not only its own
limit—that which it must renounce—but also the figure of its own desire” (223).
It is for this reason that pirates and cannibals “evoke both repulsion and
desire, rejection and wonder” (207). Of course, this is not to deny important differences
in the historical deployment of these terms.6
I merely wish to note the contradictory range of desires and fears mobilized by
capital in its dealings with cannibals and pirates. Indeed, if we acknowledge
that piracy is simultaneously complicit with and resistant to traditional
definitions of property, then we must move beyond the binary logic of an
analysis that either exonerates or condemns its object of study. In other
words, it is not enough to simply recount the details of capital’s sordid history
of riot and plunder. We must also consider piracy as an act of resistance.
According
to Walter Benjamin, the task of the critic is “to brush history against the
grain” in order to find those hidden desires and sparks of hope that might
provide resources for an assault on the objectives of capital (Benjamin 257).
Rather than perceiving history as a fixed reservoir of established facts, the
goal is instead to imagine the past as a field of corpses and debris whose
meaning is shaped by the present. As Benjamin notes, “To articulate the past
historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It
means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”
(Benjamin 255). Piracy’s legacy burdens the present with a purgatory of
deferred visions of redemption, since all of its utopian efforts to build
heaven on earth were brutally repressed. Indeed, if history weighs like a
nightmare on the brains of the living, it is only because this history is one
of defeat. Following Benjamin then, my intent in this paper is not to
reconstruct the historical truth of piracy “as it really was” (a doomed project
if ever there was one), but rather to single out and seize hold of whatever
aspects of piracy can be salvaged for constructive purposes. Efforts to redeem
the legacy of piracy must begin by gathering together fragments of the past
that converge with the needs of the present.
In recent
years, radical historians have attempted to reconstruct histories of piracy
“from the bottom up.”7 Most of
these works focus on Anglo-American pirates during the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries (although Moslem corsairs have also received attention).
The latter half of this period is often referred to as the “Golden Age of
Piracy,” when plunder at sea reached its greatest levels of intensity.
Political and economic circumstances conspired to send thousands of men8 to wreak havoc upon the sea-lanes of the
world. As Marcus Rediker notes, “Anglo-American pirates created an imperial
crisis with their relentless and successful attacks upon merchants’ property
and international commerce between 1716 and 1726. Accordingly, these
freebooters occupy a grand position in the long history of robbery at sea”
(Rediker 254). Rediker’s groundbreaking study Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea provides an historical
account of early eighteenth century maritime radicalism. He argues that the
success of piracy during this period resulted from the increasingly centralized
role of maritime trade routes as the ways and means of an emerging world
economy. In a passage that bears a striking resemblance to contemporary
descriptions of the Internet, Rediker states, “English trade routes constituted
the arteries of the imperial body between 1650 and 1750. They unified distant
parts of the globe, different markets, and distinct modes of production. They
joined local, regional, national, and international economies [...] and they
organized the flow of commodities and the movements of labor. These pulsing
routes, stretching from one port city to the next, were the most elementary
material structures of the empire, indeed of the entire world economy” (Rediker
21).9 Pirates directly challenged the
viability of these trade routes by plundering cargo and sinking ships.
Rediker
defines a pirate as “one who willingly participates in robbery on the sea, not
discriminating among nationalities in the choice of victims” (Rediker 256).
Although Rediker correctly observes that these sea robbers bore no allegiance
to their countries of origin, his emphasis on the “will” of pirates to choose
their occupation is perhaps a bit misleading. Pirates were often working-class
men dispossessed of land by enclosure, with few options other than life at sea.
As Rediker himself notes, “Almost without exception, pirates, like the larger
body of seafaring men, came from the lowest social classes. They were, as a
royal official condescendingly observed, ‘desperate Rogues’ who could have
little hope in life ashore” (Rediker 261). These were men who were “grimly
familiar with the rigors of life at sea,” having previously labored as merchant
seamen, Royal Navy sailors, or privateersmen (Rediker 260). The brutal
discipline and meager pay of these “legitimate” occupations often seemed like
grim alternatives compared to a life of crime beneath the banner of King Death.
Indeed, as governments proceeded to ban privateering during the interim of war,
mutinying ship and turning pirate was one of the few feasible means of
subsistence for seamen out of work. For these reasons, it is difficult to
theorize piracy in terms of traditional Marxist categories of analysis. Before
turning to crime, many of these men were “free” workers, or sellers of their
labor-power. As Peter Lamborn
Indeed, it
is often difficult to imagine piracy today in terms of the extent of its break
with the conditions from which it arose. Temporarily removed from the
disciplinary shackles of the church and the state, pirates “constructed a
culture of masterless men. They were as far removed from traditional
authorities as any men could be in the early eighteenth century. [...]. Here we
can see aspirations and achievements that under normal circumstances were
heavily muted, if not in many cases rendered imperceptible altogether, by the
power relationships of everyday life” (Rediker 286). Traditional histories of
piracy often emphasize these anarchic or libertarian features of life at sea.
But alongside this unrivaled pursuit of freedom and self-interest, there was
also a remarkably egalitarian dimension to piracy. As
Pirates were very nearly
communistic in their pure state. Scholars who see them simply as
proto-capitalists are making a big mistake. [...]. Marxists like Hobsbawm never
include the pirates among their approved “precursors” of true radicalism
because they see the pirates—at best—as individuals
involved in resistance simply as a form of self-aggrandizement and primitive
accumulation. They forget that groups
of pirates formed their own social spheres, and that the “governments” of these
groups (as expressed in ships’ “articles”) were both anarchistic in affording
maximum individual freedoms, and communistic in eliminating economic hierarchy.
(
As further
evidence to support his claims regarding the “communistic” or egalitarian
features of piracy,
You are a sneaking puppy, and so
are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made
for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise
to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a
pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted
numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this
difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder
the rich under the protection of our own courage. (Defoe, as quoted in
Bellamy’s reference to the thieving
practices of the ruling class of his time echoes the inflammatory rhetoric of
seventeenth-century proto-communist radicals like the Diggers. For instance, in
the Digger pamphlet Watch-word to the
City of London, Gerrard Winstanley passionately decries “the selfish
murdering fleshly Lawes of this Nation, which hangs some for stealing, and
protects others in stealing; Lords of Mannours stole the land from their fellow
creatures formerly in the conquests of Kings, and now they have made Lawes to
imprison and hang all those that seek to recover the land again out of their
thieving murdering hands” (Winstanley 9). As the English historian Christopher
Hill has argued, there is good reason to suspect the possible influence of
groups like the Diggers on late seventeenth and early eighteenth century
maritime radicalism. Hill describes pirates like Bellamy as “egalitarian
avengers” (Hill 165), taking to the seas to redress the sins of the wealthy.
Rediker extends this correspondence between pirate practices and the radical
views of the sixteen-forties and fifties by noting that the democratic
selection of officers among pirates “echoed similar demands within the New
Model Army in the English Revolution and stood in stark, telling contrast to
the near-dictatorial arrangement of command in the merchant service and the
Royal Navy” (Rediker 262-263). In order to ensure themselves against these
“legitimate” forms of oppression, pirate crews elected their own captains and
drew up collectively agreed upon articles or compacts setting the terms of each
voyage. Although the election of officers established hierarchies among members
of the crew, captains were nevertheless afforded very few privileges. As
Rediker notes, “The crew granted the captain unquestioned authority ‘in
fighting, chasing, or being chased,’ but ‘in all other Matters whatsoever’ he
was ‘governed by a Majority’” (Rediker 262). This determined opposition to
privilege among pirates bore little resemblance to the oppressive conditions of
“legitimate” life at sea.
But perhaps
the most radical feature of piracy was its antagonistic relation to private
property. It is here that we see the legacy of the Diggers in action. As
Rediker and Peter Linebaugh observe in their co-authored book The Many-Headed Hydra, the pirate ship
was “egalitarian in a hierarchical age, as pirates divided their plunder
equally, leveling the elaborate structure of pay ranks common to all other
maritime employments. [...]. By expropriating a merchant ship (after a mutiny
or a capture), pirates seized the means of maritime production and declared it
to be the common property of those who did its work” (Linebaugh and Rediker
163). Once reclaimed as a shared possession, ships became sites of permanent
revolution. Wages were abolished and replaced by a pre-capitalist share system.
As Rediker notes, pirates “considered themselves risk-sharing partners rather
than a collection of ‘hands’ who sold their muscle on an open market” (Rediker
107).
Pirate captains very frequently
took only one-and-a-half or two shares, the ship’s officers took one-and-a-half
or one-and-a-fourth, the crewmen one share, and non-combatants (boys and
musicians!) one-half or three-fourths. By contrast a privateer captain usually
took 40 shares to the crewman’s single share. Of course, one share in a
successful privateering cruise could be worth far more than a salary in the
merchant marine—or unpaid impressment into a Navy—but the contrast with
piratical egalitarianism is very striking. (
Rediker also notes that pirates
often set aside portions of wealth in order to establish common welfare funds
to compensate comrades who “sustained injury of lasting effect” (Rediker 264).
By basically leveling the elaborate hierarchy of pay ranks and distinctions
common to life aboard merchant and privateering vessels, pirates constructed
one of the most radically egalitarian social arrangements of their day.
But as I have noted, these radical pirates were by no means more than a minority. The bulk of sea robberies were actually performed by the state. Marx’s narrative of primitive accumulation serves as an important reminder of the fact that European nations (and their various claims regarding territorial properties) were founded upon histories of theft. As Raymond Williams observes:
There is no innocence in the established proprietors, at any particular point in time, unless we ourselves choose to put it there. Very few titles to property could bear humane investigation, in the long process of conquest, theft, political intrigue, courtiership, extortion and the power of money. It is a deep and persistent illusion to suppose that time confers on these familiar processes of acquisition an innocence which can be contrasted with the ruthlessness of subsequent states of the same essential drives...the “ancient stocks,” to which we are sentimentally referred, are ordinarily only those families who had been pressing and exploiting their neighbors rather longer. (Williams 50)
This
alliance of governments and pirates reached its greatest level of intensity
during
These practices lasted well beyond
Indeed, the
line between piracy and privateering was a thin one at best, often amounting to
little more than an economic consideration of whether or not the state was in
on the take. The same actions—robbery and depredation at sea—were variously
embraced and rejected over time depending for the most part upon the degree of
their compatibility with state interests. For example, just ten years before
Thus, in a complicated series of reversals, piracy was transformed from “criminal behavior” to “an exploitable resource” to “a practice that must be eliminated.” Thomson outlines this historical dialectic of repulsion and desire as follows:
The state would authorize privateering, which was legalized piracy, during wartime. When the war concluded, thousands of seamen were left with no more appealing alternative than piracy. The state would make some desultory efforts to suppress the pirates, who would simply move somewhere else. With the outbreak of the next war, the state would offer blanket pardons to pirates who would agree to serve as privateers, and the process would start all over again. (Thomson 54)
Piracy
therefore seems to have served a double function as both a necessary component
of the process of primitive accumulation, as well as a radical resistance to
this process. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
A similar
effort to monopolize processes of primitive accumulation can be seen to
motivate contemporary corporate acts and renunciations of piracy, although the
primary “theater of operations” for these acts has shifted. Piracy has spread
from the waters of the
By tracing
this progression from sea-lanes to cyberspace, I don’t mean to deny the
continued presence of maritime piracy as a threat to global commerce. In fact,
current US Naval Institute publications like Jack A. Gottschalk and Brian P.
Flanagan’s Jolly Roger With an Uzi
seem to indicate that the number of incidents of high-seas piracy has actually
increased in recent years. Nevertheless, corporate efforts to mobilize public
opinion regarding piracy have tended to focus on its online manifestations.
This emphasis on digital rather than maritime piracy is symptomatic of the
ongoing global restructuring of capital. In The
Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write, “The need of a constantly
expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface
of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere” (Marx and Engels 13). But capital is no longer content
with the surface of the globe. As it encounters the planetary limits of
colonial or territorial expansion, capital finds that it must increasingly rely
upon the commodification of virtual geographies. Hence the construction of
cyberspace.
Dan
Schiller refers to this new stage of expansion as digital capitalism. Although
a number of competing terms have been used to track capital’s latest movements
(including postmodernity, Empire, global capitalism, and the information
society), I prefer “digital capitalism” because of its tendency to accentuate
the influence of computers on contemporary forms of production. In his book Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global
Market System, Schiller argues that “the Internet comprises nothing less
than the central production and control apparatus of an increasingly
supranational market system” (Schiller xiv). While Schiller perhaps overstates
the importance of the Internet (especially since, according to UNESCO,
approximately one-sixth of the world’s population remains illiterate), his
comments nevertheless direct our attention to the fact that digital
communications technologies are now primary sites of investment and growth. In
recent years, capitalists have made manic efforts to restructure their assets
and direct investment toward the commercial exploitation of information. As
Tessa Morris-Suzuki notes, capitalist profits are no longer singularly reliant
upon the “theft of alien labor time” (Morris-Suzuki 65). They now additionally
depend upon “the private appropriation of ‘accumulated social knowledge’” (65).
Digital technologies are increasingly employed to store and transmit this
knowledge. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that this digital
restructuring of capital does not constitute a wholly new “postindustrial”
social order. This is certainly not (as its apologists would argue) a
“friction-free” or “kinder and gentler” beast. Instead, following Jameson, we
might say that digital capitalism is the most recent stage in the “systemic
modification of capitalism itself” (Jameson xii). In other words, capital’s
latest transformations are fueled by a dialectic of difference and repetition.
The lyrics may change but the song remains the same.
At the
center of these shifts are debates regarding intellectual property legislation.
As (predominantly American) corporations grow more heavily dependent upon the
commodification of information and knowledge as a source of profit, the
international protection of these properties increasingly becomes an issue. As
Christopher May notes, legally recognized ownership of intellectual property
confers upon corporations a variety of economic benefits, including “the right
to charge rent for use, to receive compensation for loss and collect payment
for transfer or sale” (May 7). The precise scale of these benefits is
astounding. For instance, in their co-authored book Global Hollywood, Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and
Richard Maxwell write, “[Intellectual property] protection is especially
important now, because the copyright industries are the fastest growing sectors
of the
This
pressure typically appears in the guise of potential trade sanctions or a
denial of most-favored nation status based on the terms of the World Trade
Organization’s 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPs). In this sense then, the TRIPs Agreement represents the most
comprehensive effort thus far by American corporations to monopolize control of
the international exchange of intellectual properties. As May notes, “The
central intention of the TRIPs agreement is to provide a legal framework for a
single intellectual property regime throughout the international system” (May
70). In other words, TRIPs “imposes a definition of intellectual property
rights directly disadvantageous to Third World countries which, holding few
patents themselves, have been brought within the scope of a regime where they
will be held strictly accountable for their state of exponentially increasing
indebtedness” (Frow 89). And to ensure this accountability, TRIPs contains
enforcement provisions that standardize responses to breaches of its framework.
This means that countries that fail to comply with agreement standards can then
be subjected to trade retaliation if the dispute settlement mechanism of the
WTO has determined the existence of a case of non-compliance. TRIPs therefore
provides US corporations with broad legal protections for their claims
regarding the ownership of intellectual properties. And this is by no means a
coincidence: TRIPs is largely the result of prolonged lobbying efforts on the
part of a private sector trade coalition called the Intellectual Property
Committee (IPC) formed to represent the interests of major
This desire
for dominance permeates the language of US policy initiatives regarding the
ongoing TRIPs-enabled and corporate-sponsored primitive accumulation of
information. Schiller cites an article by David Rothkopf entitled “In Praise of
Cultural Imperialism?” as an example of this rhetoric of dominance.
Rothkopf—who served as Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce during the first
Clinton administration, and later became managing director of Kissinger
Associates, a corporate consulting company run by the former Secretary of
State—makes an explicit (and for him, desirable) connection between
contemporary American efforts to privatize information and the “exemplary”
(i.e. piratical) naval practices of the British Empire. He writes, “For the
United States, a central objective of an Information Age foreign policy must be
to win the battle of the world’s information flows, dominating the airwaves as
Copyright
industries have been forced to take these assertive, domineering stances since
digital technologies have largely outmoded the conditions of possibility upon
which their products were founded. Indeed, with the advent of the Internet and
digital modes of exchange, information is transformed (at least in theory) into
an endlessly duplicable resource. This excessively reproductive quality of
digitized information distinguishes it from traditional commodity forms. But
knowledge commodities are not simply cheap to replicate after their initial
stage of production—they can also never be “consumed” or exhausted after use.
Morris-Suzuki emphasizes these “peculiarities” of knowledge in her essay
“Robots and Capitalism,” where she argues that “the special properties of
knowledge...mean that it can only acquire exchange value where institutional
arrangements confer a degree of monopoly power on its owner” (Morris-Suzuki
17). Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl, and Michael Stark develop this further in their
introduction to Cutting Edge: Technology,
Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, where they write,
“Capitalism thrives in this new climate only by bending and subsuming knowledge
formation to its needs through aggressive privatization, ‘harnessing freely
available “social knowledge” to the profit-making activities of the large
corporation’” (Davis et al 5). In other words, producers of intellectual
property can only generate profits so long as they manufacture artificial
conditions of scarcity. The only way for corporations to generate this
condition of scarcity is by renting out products over limited periods of time.
Delivery or distribution networks must therefore be strictly controlled.
But
controlled transmissions are not the only means by which capital “contains” or
privatizes information. Legal institutions are also responsible for the
construction of knowledge as property. Indeed, as May notes, “Property qua property does not pre-exist the
apparatus of government (or the state), waiting to be recognized legally;
rather, the legal recognition of property constitutes its existence in a form
we can identify” (May 16). Corporations have responded accordingly to this
constitutive power of legal discourse, attempting in recent years to both
strengthen and extend the domain of laws regarding copyrights, patents, and
trademarks in order to ensure a continued equation between knowledge and
property. These efforts culminated in the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act of 1998.13
According to Richard A. Spinello, the Bono legislation “extends the term of
copyright protection by twenty years: For individual authors the term is now
life of the author plus seventy years (instead of fifty years), and for
corporations the term is now ninety-five years (instead of seventy-five years)”
(Spinello 163). Because of this act, no copyrighted works in the
This
massive extension of copyright power bears a striking resemblance to the
English Enclosure Acts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
With the passage of the Bono Act, an ever greater expanse of the cultural
domain is fenced off and subjected to private corporate ownership. Aside from
the more immediate economic benefits conferred upon corporations by this
process, the privatization of the cultural and intellectual commons also
significantly curtails the ability of citizens to critically respond to and
contest the bewildering proliferation of spectacles and signs that comprises
the fabric of everyday life. As Rosemary J. Coombe observes, expanded
intellectual property laws “deprive us of possibilities for dialogic
interaction with the cultural reality or life-world of postmodernity” (Coombe
50). By prohibiting the reproduction of vital cultural texts, copyright laws
effectively criminalize various methods of critical scrutiny and transformative
appropriation. Since many of these texts are “constitutive of the cultural
milieu in which we live,” their legal status as “exclusive properties that
cannot be reproduced without consent and compensation” ultimately constrains
“communication within, through, and about the media that surrounds us” (Coombe
51). Monopoly privileges therefore confer upon corporations the ability not
only to determine the content of the texts that increasingly confront us, but
also the conditions under which these texts are put to use.
As I have
noted above though, a series of popular piratical social practices have emerged
online in direct opposition to these corporate acts of primitive accumulation.
With the advent of downloadable shareware programs like the highly publicized
Napster (written by an 18-year-old college dropout named Shawn Fanning) in
1999, the online exchange of music became commonplace, and the term “digital
piracy” was born. Like the radical pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, today’s digital pirates explicitly challenge traditional conceptions
of property. But unlike their maritime predecessors, contemporary pirates base
their operations around online file-sharing technologies, which are used to
establish geographically dispersed pirate economies or networks. These
decentralized “peer-to-peer” (p2p) exchange networks establish direct
connections between the hard drives of isolated user PCs. As the phrase
“peer-to-peer” would indicate, hierarchical “client-server” relationships are
eliminated or rejected in favor of leveled communication between peers. Although
these file-sharing applications are most commonly used to download MP3 music
files, popular programs like KaZaA also allow users to freely exchange
digitally-rendered copies of videos, images, documents, software, and games.
Predictably
enough, business representatives and journalists have been quick to respond to
these new file-sharing technologies, alternately positing either the criminal
or revolutionary implications of online services like Audiogalaxy and KaZaA.
For instance, Napster was effectively criminalized and shut down in February of
2001 as a result of lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA), which is basically a copyright cartel (although they would
define themselves as a trade association) representing the legal and economic
interests of the five major record labels—AOL Time Warner, EMI-Capitol,
Bertelsmann, Sony, and Universal Vivendi.14
Given the monopolistic distribution networks these five companies have
consolidated in recent years (and the substantial profits they garner), the
RIAA’s hostility to file-sharing certainly makes sense financially. But from
the perspective of pirates, the RIAA is simply a bully with legal leverage,
representing an increasingly corrupt record industry that exploits both artists
and consumers. Indeed, the public’s perception of the RIAA as a “playground
bully” has strengthened dramatically in recent months due to the organization’s
misguided legal campaign against college students, as well as its effort to
prosecute an apparently “criminal-minded” twelve-year-old
But surreal
hype notwithstanding, file-sharing technologies certainly remain sites of
intense struggle and conflict. Battles over piracy are fought on both legal and
discursive terrain. For example, in a “Questions and Answers” document
published on their website, the RIAA effectively redefines the word ‘sharing’
in order to unequivocally state, “[File-sharing] is stealing. Period. Sharing
is when one person lends a product to another, expecting its return.
[File-sharing] is mass duplication and distribution of copyrighted material.
There’s no sharing going on.”18 This
remarkable instance of Orwellian doublespeak is characteristic of RIAA
rhetoric. Meanwhile, the online independent music magazine Pitchforkmedia.com
has published a series of articles over the past two years documenting the
continuing legal struggles between the RIAA and popular file-sharing services
like Audiogalaxy, KaZaA, Morpheus, and Grokster. In a Pitchfork article dated
Tuesday May 28, 2002, Will Bryant reports, “The Recording Industry Association
of America took aim at Audiogalaxy in court last Friday, alleging that the
popular service has not done enough to protect against copyrighted files being shared
by its users, despite the good-faith efforts made by Audiogalaxy to block
specific files at the copyright owners’ request.”19
Within one month of this allegation, and after having endured intense legal
pressure, Audiogalaxy caved in to the RIAA’s demands, including the immediate
adoption of an artificially imposed filtering system that required “not only
the songwriter, but the music publisher and record company to all provide
permission before allowing Audiogalaxy users to swap files.”20 But as with Napster, this apparent
defeat simply encouraged pirates to migrate toward new applications, in an
endless deferral of the law.
As these
recent legal battles indicate, digital modes of reproduction and exchange
fundamentally challenge the artificial conditions of scarcity upon which
capitalist economies prey. One is reminded of Marx’s famous Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, where he writes, “At a certain stage of their
development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with
the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression of the
same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work
hitherto. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations
turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution” (Marx 4-5).
But while traditional capitalist property relations clearly seem to constrain
the reproductive and re-distributive potential of computer technologies (and
file-sharing applications in particular), there are nevertheless serious
ambiguities regarding the political attitudes of digital pirates themselves. As
with the maritime pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
contemporary digital piracy exhibits a contradictory array of both libertarian
and anarcho-communist dimensions. For instance, the slogan “Information Wants
to be Free” has become a kind of cyberlibertarian rallying cry. The first issue
of Pirate Magazine (an online hacker
newsletter from the late 1980s devoted to the pirate and phone-phreak “computer
underground”) contains an anonymously authored editorial stating, “A pirate is
somebody who believes that information belongs to the people. [...] By keeping
information open and flowing and not under the control of a privileged few, we
are enhancing democracy and freedom of the marketplace. PIRATES ARE FREEDOM
FIGHTERS KEEPING THE DREAM ALIVE!”21 This
emphasis on the so-called “freedom of the marketplace” exemplifies the eclectic
brew of both “anarchic” or “populist” and radical right-wing libertarian
ideologies that commonly pervade hacker and pirate discourse (including
mainstream derivations of this discourse, typified by magazines like WIRED and the now-defunct Mondo 2000). Vivian Sobchack describes
this cyberlibertarian perspective as follows: “Although [cyberlibertarianism]
dreams of a communitarian utopia, its major impulses are to secure maximum
individualism and privatization, and it is blind to the historical structures
that go beyond individual motivation and ‘do-it-yourself’ entrepreneurship in
determining ‘winners’ and ‘losers’” (Sobchack 329-330). Because this mutant
strain of libertarianism has become such an important feature of pirate
self-perception, any attempt to discuss the radical potential of piracy must
therefore simultaneously recognize this reactionary dimension as well.
Indeed,
digital piracy may pose a significant challenge to ongoing corporate strategies
of primitive accumulation, but it is nevertheless a predominantly first-world
form of resistance. In order to participate in the “hi-tech gift economies”
(Barbrook 172) of digital exchange networks, users must first have access to
relatively powerful computers with high-speed Internet connections, as well as
a certain limited degree of technical literacy. These access requirements and
their attendant exclusions certainly go some way toward explaining the oddly
reactionary ideologies of digital pirates themselves. But more importantly,
they remind us of the fact that the re-distributive power of online
file-sharing technologies can only extend as far as the Internet itself. A
recent article by Andrew Ross Sorkin published in the Sunday May 4, 2003 issue
of The New York Times indicates that
corporations are beginning to recognize the effectiveness of these technical or
structural limitations of digital piracy, and future anti-piracy efforts are
likely to be modeled accordingly. As Sorkin notes, record companies are
“quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would
sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people that download pirated
music.” These invasive countermeasures (some of which are illegal according to
state and federal wiretap laws) range from “locking” or “freezing” computers to
“attacking personal Internet connections so as to slow or halt downloads of
pirated music” to “spreading copies of fake music files across file-sharing
networks like KaZaA and Morpheus.”22 Thus,
rather than wasting time and money on lawsuits, record companies are now aggressively
pursuing efforts to construct what Lawrence Lessig calls “architectures of
control” (Lessig 126). According to Lessig, behavior in cyberspace is primarily
controlled not by traditional forms of legislation but by programming codes or
imperatives of compliance—in other words, the programming and architecture of
networks themselves. Record companies have now realized that the most effective
and efficient way to stop piracy is by remodeling the technologies upon which
it relies. By embracing these technical methods of punishment and repression,
corporations are essentially sidestepping government and taking the law into
their own hands.
These
aggressive corporate efforts to control or subdue online acts of piracy bear a
striking resemblance to recent experiments in the field of biotechnology. In
both cases, profits are garnered and properties are secured through the
strategic re-coding of information. The piratical efforts of the American music
and film industries to monopolize ownership of the cultural commons mirrors the
biotech industry’s attempts to patent the genetic codes of life itself. Like
most schools of modern biology, the biotech industry proceeds from the
assumption that organisms are essentially laboring units commissioned to
process an internalized genetic code. Life forms are reduced to what Richard
Dawkins calls “survival machines” (Dawkins vii) that begin as condensed packets
of information, organize themselves through a process of programmed
self-assembly, operate on environments in a controlled manner according to set
instructions, and reproduce by means of transmission. Indeed, as Edward Yoxen
notes, biotechnology is essentially the industrial projection of “nature as
programmed matter” (Yoxen 198). The end result of this logic is an instrumental
conception of organisms that subordinates life to the commodity form.
More
precisely, this reductive interpretation of life as information renders the
genetic material of organisms legally susceptible to claims of private
ownership. For instance, as a result of international intellectual property
legislation like the TRIPs Agreement, Western corporations have been granted
the right to expropriate and patent the indigenous knowledges and agricultural
resources of
Not
surprisingly, the word “piracy” appears in the title of a number of books
published over the past few years in response to these privatizing practices,
including Vandana Shiva’s Biopiracy: The
Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, as well as a collection of essays from
human rights publisher Clarity Press called The
Piracy of America: Profiteering in the Public Domain. Shiva’s book is
particularly interesting in terms of the present argument, since she defines
“biopiracy” as the private appropriation of indigenous knowledge-cultures by
Western biotechnology firms, and explicitly relates these practices to Marx’s
earlier “moment” of primitive accumulation. From Shiva’s perspective, the
corporate expropriation of Third World genetic resources is perceived as an
extension or intensification of the piratical practices that led to the
European colonization of the
Unfortunately,
this ongoing legacy of Western brutality is often viewed by legitimizing parties
as “the way of nature,” and hence dismissed as a necessary evil. Shiva notes,
“At the heart of
I had
originally hoped to conclude this essay with all the polemical force and
conviction of the final paragraphs of The
Communist Manifesto. This was to be an insurgent battle cry, a call to
arms—something along the lines of “Pirates of the World, Unite!” Unfortunately,
that kind of motivational certitude and determination now seems at some gut
level like a thing of the past irretrievably lost. Indeed, the social world has
not resolved itself into “two great
hostile camps” (Marx and Engels 10). Firmly betwixt the world of “corporate
expropriators” and “radical pirates” lies a vast gray area of ambivalence and
equivocation. Thus, in order to arrive at a conclusion that incorporates this
gray area into its assessment of the potential for piracy to function as a
resistance to global capital, I would like to briefly weigh in on one final set
of developments in the debate over digital piracy. As I have stated at various
points, there are two main opponents in the war against piracy—
Since July
of 2003, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has launched a series
of “public service announcements” produced by Twentieth Century Fox as part of
its multi-pronged, “Popular Front”-style attack on digital piracy. (Author’s
Note: I love that these announcements are considered “public services”—as if
Jack Valenti and the MPAA were doing
theatergoers a favor by subjecting them to industry propaganda). Every
major exhibitor in the
In spite of
(or perhaps because of) its disingenuousness, Chernin’s statement provides a
concise illustration of MPAA tactics. The industry’s aim throughout this
campaign has been to elicit sympathy from consumers by positioning its
bottom-level employees as the PR equivalent of a “human shield.” And I don’t
just mean to sound witty here: the corporations represented by the MPAA have literally resorted to hiding behind
their workers. As in all good wartime propaganda, troops of the industrial army
are wielded as pawns to disguise the fact that power lies somewhere else.
Suddenly piracy is to blame for the
ruthless expendability of corporate labor (rather than, say, the logic of
capitalism itself). One of the PSAs released in theaters last summer features a
49-year-old
The truth
of course is that all of these workers
are potentially vulnerable as a result of digital piracy. And yet, according to
this logic, the corporation can do no wrong. Ethical obligations are
conveniently shouldered off onto consumers. The well-being of workers like
Goldstein and Perry no longer depends on union actions or corporate
decision-making processes; the fate of these workers now rests in the hands of
“ordinary” Americans—people like you and me. This way of stating the problem
ultimately fails to account for capital’s own hand in the crime. Indeed, in
order to properly assess the utopian potential of contemporary acts of piracy,
we must first acknowledge that there is no such thing as a “pure” form of
politics, where no one gets hurt. Global capital is a diffuse enemy. It is
everywhere and nowhere. Most importantly, there is no position of absolute
externality from which to launch an attack, and thus a fraction of all damages
are internally sustained. Nevertheless, the “might” of the entertainment
industry, from top to bottom, is also clearly perceived to be at risk in these
situations—hence the MPAA’s massively-funded defensive campaign to “educate”
consumers about the dangers of piracy. It is this threat to the entertainment
industry as a whole (rather than just
its lower quarters) that makes piracy worth its salt.
Throughout
this paper I have attempted to show that discourses of piracy appear as both
defenses of and resistances to ongoing processes of primitive accumulation. In
the past, these processes involved the massive expropriation of land and
resources resulting from Europe’s prodigious “discovery” and conquest of the
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1 The aphorism “information
wants to be free” became a popular late-nineties battle-cry among certain
“liberated” sectors of the so-called New Economy. Although ex-Grateful Dead
lyricist turned cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow is often cited as the author
of this statement, Barlow himself identifies Stewart Brand as the original
culprit. This confusion of authorship lends the statement a certain ironic
degree of authority—indeed, within our current ultra-proprietary climate, we
might say that information is only “free” to the extent that it remains
unattributed.
2 See Andrew Ross Sorkin,
“Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy.”
3 See the Motion Picture
Association of America home page for details.
4 A sequel is scheduled for
release during the summer of 2006.
5 I use this term with some
discomfort. Hardt and Negri borrow the phrase “immaterial labor” from Italian
Marxists like Maurizio Lazzarato, defining it as productive activity involving
“the manipulation of symbols and information” (Hardt and Negri 291), or “labor
that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product,
knowledge, or communication” (290). While “immaterial” has the advantage of
widespread use, it nevertheless creates problems in its tendency to situate
abstractions like symbols and services in opposition to the “stuff” of a
materialist worldview. Thus it might be helpful to substitute “immaterial” with
words like “nonphysical” or “intangible” (although each of these terms have
problems of their own).
6 For instance, throughout the
early modern period (i.e. Marx’s “moment” of primitive accumulation),
cannibalistic desires were almost unilaterally projected by a proto-capitalist
Europe onto its “primitive” New World other (although discourses of cannibalism
were also sometimes used to describe “vagrant” populations internal to Europe),
whereas piracy was often viewed as heterogeneous and dispersed—both an internal
and external threat.
7 Peter Lamborn Wilson
humorously describes this developing field of study as “piratology.” See
8 There are few known examples
of Anglo-American women pirates other than the famous Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
9 By comparing Rediker’s
discussion of seventeenth and eighteenth century sea routes with recent
descriptions of the Internet, I mean to suggest that these historically
distinct structures perform similar functions as the arteries and veins of the
world economy. Maritime trade routes continue to operate as crucial modes of
transmission and exchange, but their centrality to capital has now been
displaced by the growth of air commerce and digital communication networks.
Piracy’s emergence in cyberspace attests to this shift in power.
10 Although
11 See Olivia Isil, “Piracy,
Privateering and Elizabethan Maritime Expansion.”
12 This is not to suggest the
unimportance of that vast network of low-tech criminal activities involved in
the production of bootlegs, counterfeits, and all manner of pirated goods. The
global proliferation of these “black” or clandestine markets undoubtedly
represents a serious challenge to the interests of the multinationals. Indeed,
MPAA president and CEO Jack Valenti has stated repeatedly that the defeat of
both “earthbound and cyberspace
thieves” is his “highest priority in the 21st century” (Valenti,
quoted in Miller 136). However, of these two modes of resistance, I would argue
that digital piracy is currently perceived as a greater threat to the
entertainment industry because of its potential for unrestrained growth. The
actions of “earthbound,” low-tech pirates are ultimately limited by conditions
of material scarcity, whereas the actions of digital pirates are largely beyond
such constraints. For an excellent account of low-tech piracy as a strategy of
resistance, see Manthia Diawara, “Toward a Regional Imaginary in
13 The act of course was named
after the late pop singer / TV star / Republican Congressman of
14 The RIAA rigorously
maintains a propaganda site at: http://www.riaa.com.
15 The New York Post ran an article on Tuesday September 9, 2003 with a
headline that reads, “12-Year-Old Sued for Music Downloading.” The article
begins as follows: “Brianna LaHara said she was frightened to learn she was
among the hundreds of people sued yesterday by giant music companies in federal
courts around the country. ‘I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,’
Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives
with her mom and her 9-year-old brother. ‘I thought it was OK to download music
because my mom paid a service fee for it. Out of all people, why did they pick
me?’” (See Lorena Mongelli, “Music Pirate”).
16 See Gallagher, “Don’t Steal
the Music—Steal the Idea,” available online at: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/devbase.nsf/articles/doc2000081101.
17 Andrew Sullivan,
“Dot-communist Manifesto,” New York Times
Magazine, 11 June 2000, pp. 30-34 (http://www.west.net/~wwmr/dotcommy.htm).
18 This unintentionally
humorous, anonymously authored document is available online through the RIAA’s
website at: http://www.riaa.com/pdf/scour_QA.pdf.
19 Will Bryant, “RIAA Sues
Audiogalaxy, Demands Users’ Souls,” Pitchforkmedia.com,
28 May 2002.
20 Will Bryant, “Audiogalaxy
Makes Pact with the Devil,” Pitchforkmedia.com,
18 June 2002.
21 Copies of this magazine can
be found online at: http://www.phreak.org/archives/underground/pirate/PIRATE-1.txt
22 For more information, see
Sorkin, “Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy.”
23 For more information on the
Human Genome Project, see the National Human Genome Research Institute web
page, located at: http://www.genome.gov.
24 For more information on
Incyte, go to: http://www.incyte.com/control/aboutincyte.
25 Each of these announcements
can be viewed online at: http://www.respectcopyrights.org
26 For more on the Junior
Achievement Organization, go to: http://www.ja.org
27 When using a military term
like “collateral damage,” I don’t mean to sound cold and distant. My father has
worked as a commercial cameraman in