Freebooter

“ The relationship between the authorities and the freebooters is often of so equivocal a character, that foreign naval officers in their crusade against pirates may have failed at times to make the proper discrimination. ”

“ Such were the conditions of life that gave rise to that peculiar class of outlaws and semi-outlaws known as the buccaneers—those pirates, hunters, and freebooters, whose very name has become a synonym of all that is lawless, desperate, godless. ”

“ Jobs can’t build a new operating system without BitTorrent inside, once we get to that point the political economy of sharing is sufficiently deep in the layers of the network that it makes sense to begin to talk about the business model of the net being what they are pleased to call “piracy” and we call “sharing”.
In other words, we are moving much tighter to the endpoint in the culture wars much more quickly than I had anticipated when I set out; I find myself pleasantly surprised at the degree to which even the Disney‐like parties are now on the run. ”

“ Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. ”

“ It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers think that computing belongs to them, and they can retail it with price stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap! But pricing "information" is like trying to price air or price dreams. Well, anybody on a pirate board knows that computing can be, and ought to be, FREE. Pirate boards are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't belong to anybody but the underground. ”

“ Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.
So we live in a political economy in which the commitment to the freedom of the software is the beginning of a commitment to freedom of autonomy at the end points – that would mean you, you’re an end point. You’re a productive end point, as well as a consuming end point, but you’re an end point, unless you’re a network operator, in which case, please leave now. ”

“ They are also illegal, but it is very rare, almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to be prosecuted. Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the program, being digital data, becomes infinitely reproducible. Even the instructions to the game, any manuals that accompany it, can be reproduced as text files, or photocopied from legitimate sets. Other users on boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics. And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer games can certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-less friends. ”

“ The free software revolution is a revolution in which a bunch of technically sophisticated people, you know, I needn’t, I’m not being deprecatory when I say that you’re different from most other people, it was an acquired taste, a minority skill; it remains something which most of the people out there can’t possibly grasp when you try and tell it to them your way. And the sharing of culture without permission, though it seems like child’s play to children, as you know it doesn’t seem like anything except child’s play to adults. ”

“ They lock things up. We make things free. They lock them up. We make them free. And we go on about this business, bit by bit by bit, and sooner or alter, the game is over.
I won't say a word about free culture because I know it's in safe hands.
But I will say something about bandwidth and about the spectrum, because this is the fundamental next terrain of the struggle for human rights.
We made free software. We can distribute over a network, only using stuff we made ourselves according to rules that ensure freedom.
We can protect the freedom of hardware. ”

“ Using the Net, you can even pirate paper books; there is no technical reason why machines cannot scan the latest from Philip Roth or Tom Clancy, convert their novels to bits and bytes, and zap them to your friends in Juneau. Software-based copy protection could help safeguard electronic books. ”

“ So, with that in mind then, what we have is a system in which a series of private parties who have used immense amounts of power over culture, over bandwidth, over communications, in the course of the 20th century are beginning to find themselves all simultaneously under threat from the free layer of the net. ”

“ Snub or no snub, both O'Reilly and Raymond say the term "open source" won over just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. The attendees shared ideas and experiences and brainstormed on how to improve free software's image. Of key concern was how to point out the successes of free software, particularly in the realm of Internet infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the GNU/Linux challenge to Microsoft Windows. But like the earlier meeting at VA, the discussion soon turned to the problems associated with the term "free software." ”

“ Free software, in other words, is to the cultural system of creation and distribution the rules that refuse to be made in a user‐disabling fashion. They are the rules of agility in the market or in society, and they are the rules of non‐exclusivity in control of cultural distribution.
A system of non‐exclusivity in the making and implementing of the rules for cultural distribution also touches on a second great phenomenon in 21st century culture. The replacement of the analog by the digital is also the replacement of the consumer by the “prosumer”. ”

“ Large portions of the Mac OS X operating system are also open source, including WebKit, the core of Safari, the Mac OS X web browser.
The open source and free software movements have now built free alternatives for just about every major type of computer application, from word processing to video games. And for a time it seemed like Stallman’s dream had come true: one could truly continue to use computers without having laws restrict one’s freedom—it was possible “to get along without any software that is not free.” ”

“ Now, with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time Freeware.
Such commercial exploitation was completely within the confines of the free software agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price," advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech." ”

“ If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful." ”

“ It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has prohibited us from serving the public. So what's going to happen when users encounter these gaps in free software? Well, if they have been persuaded by the open source movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful reliable software, they're likely to say, `You didn't deliver what you promised. This software's not more powerful. ”

“ Free hardware is the process of taking that free software and ensuring that the network within which it exists remains under the control of the people who own and use the hardware itself.
This seems very simple.
But it is not very simple because hardware is now the ground of contestation of the counterrevolution. The distributors of everything, those people who are sorry to hear that their expiration date on their legal regime has arrived, have a proposal. ”

“ We have battles about culture, we have battles about software, we have battles about bandwidth. But we have come far enough that the tools of those confrontations now favor us. Time’s on our side. And the building of the infrastructure for 21st century freedom that we need is an infrastructure we can build. ”

“ So, we find ourselves now watching the question of property problematized by the very same bozos who want to use that conception of property to interfere with the technologies of freedom, who want to see our attempt to build a network that self‐assembles in a prosumer basis where software is thing we make and share, rather than something we consume, who want to interfere with that structure for reasons of support of an ideology which is already perishing on all the fronts more or less simultaneously. ”

“ But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all over the world had the Web.
“So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can run voice-calling as an application, but it’s not tied to the phone network. It doesn’t care whose wires or wireless it lives on top of. It’s got all these virtues that are key to free expression. ”

“ The success of GNU/Linux has led to a larger free software movement as well as the “open source” movement, which releases software and its source code under copyright licenses that provide some of the software freedoms. ”

“ But whatever is the fate of free software in that regard, whatever is the outcome with respect to the technical situation, for which the free software system was built, that is merely a necessary, not a sufficient condition to the larger goals of the free software movement, and of the collection of movements and ideas that we all here are part of.
We must have a network that makes it possible for us to share. We must prevent the activity of the network in supporting sharing from being biased by those people whose primary concern is preventing sharing as competition to ownership. ”

“ The free software movement’s contribution to free media and free culture is, I think at this point, possible to describe very simply. We have moved more rapidly than most people thought possible to a world of the replacement of analog forms of culture and industrial forms of cultural distribution with digital forms of manufacture and distribution of culture. ”

“ Microsoft's Shared Source program recognizes that there are many benefits to the openness, community involvement, and innovation of the Open Source model. But the most important component of that model, the one that makes all of the others work, is freedom. By attacking the one license that is specifically designed to fend off their customer and developer lock-in strategy, they hope to get the benefits of Free Software without sharing those benefits with those who participate in creating them. ”

“ When economists looked at open source software they saw not a single twenty- dollar bill lying implausibly on the sidewalk, but whole bushels of them. Why would anyone work on a project the fruits of which could be appropriated by anyone? Since copyright adheres on fixation—since the computer programmer already has the legal power to exclude others—why would he or she choose to take the extra step of adopting a license that undermined that exclusion? Why would anyone choose to allow others to use and modify the results of their hard work? ”

“ Free software is embedded irremovably in the belly of all of the developed societies in all of everything they do. It’s not exclusively embedded there, but even the monopolists, which is the deepest funded and most powerful technological entity in the history of human beings, can no longer remove the free commons from the network. ”

“ Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, If You Can't Fight For Your Freedom, You Don't Deserve It. ”

“ Still, the underlying logic of Stallman's argument-that open source advocates emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software over the political advantages-remains uncontested. Rather than stress the political significance of free software programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity of the hacker development model. Citing the power of peer review, the open source argument paints programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built, better inspected and, by extension, more trushworthy to the average user. ”

“ So... now we're going to watch some excerpts from his Freedom to Connect speech, and as you'll see, Aaron actually says it better than I could. So, over to you, Aaron.
SWARTZ: There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in, or a violent smashing of shop windows? ”