[p2p-research] Fwd: [knowledgelab] <nettime> Pirates of the Internets - unite!

[Michel Bauwens]

excellent analysis of the political nature of the pirates

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante at ecobytes.net>
Date: Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 4:18 PM
Subject: Fwd: [knowledgelab] <nettime> Pirates of the Internets - unite!
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


perhaps you saw this one...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: <nettime> Pirates of the Internets - unite!
Resent-Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:40:49 +0200
Resent-From: nettime at kein.org
Resent-To: Nettime <nettime-l at kein.org>

With 215,000 votes in the European election from the Swedish precinct,
the Internet pirates have winds in their sailes. Miltos asked in a
previos posting on this list if similar parties will now spawn in other
EU electorates. In the ligth of his question, it can be interesting to
note that the two major events which angered people in Sweden to point
that they casted their votes for the Pirate Party (PP), had only scantly
to do with EU intellectual property directives.

The first major cause of anger was a law proposing to extend military
surveillance from radio communication to include Internet trafic. The
operation is located at "Försvarets Radioanstalt" (FRA) i.e. a branch of
Swedish military intelligence. Supposedly, the FRA is only going to
eavesdrop on electrons crossing the Swedish border, but, a message sent
from one computer in Sweden to anohter and passing through a server in a
foreign country will be subject to FRA snoopers. The law originates in
the department of defence and had nothing to do with the EU political
machinery, though in the future, for sure, it might converge with IP
enforcement. The two commonly accepted explanations as to why it was
proposed are, firstly, that the staff at FRA are looking for new job
assignments when their old task of listening in on Russian radio
communication has lost its rationale, secondly, to gather information
about suspects which can be traded with foreign (US) security agencies.

The second cause behind the success of the Pirate Party is, of course,
the recent verdict against the founders of the Pirate Bay. The ruling
was very harsh, the four accused were sentenced to one year in prison
and roughly 3,000,000 euro in damage. Soon after the ruling the
legitimacy of the court case was questioned when it was found out that
the judge had ties with several of the people on the prosecution side
through their joint membership in three different intellectual property
organisations (Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt, .SE-stiftelsen,
Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd) The purpose of the first
group is to inform professionals working with intellectual property
rights about developments in their field, and the second group
administrates the Swedish Internet domain. While the judge's membership
in these two groups might have been entirely legitimate, something
different has to be said about the last organisation, since it actively
lobbies for stricter IP laws. After that debacle, the public image was
firmly establisehd that the court ruling against the Pirate Bay was not
something emanating from the general will of the people and embodied in
national legal institutions, but rahter was executed by corporate
America with the Swedish state as its proxy. Hence, just as when the
euro-sceptical political party "Junilistan" won a seat in the last EU
election (now it will be replaced with PP), one might suspect that an
element of nostalgia over lost national sovereignity contributed to this
outcome.

The other question raised by Miltos' posting is what the political
significance could be of the recent success of the Swedish pirate
movement? The title of his posting, "all pirates of the internets -
unite!" suggests how this movement has often been received abroad. After
the EU-election, I got cheerful emails from friends and activists in the
anti/alter-globalisation movement on the continent who perceived the
success of the Swedish pirates as a victory for their broader, political
agenda. From inside the borders, however, the link between the
traditional left and the pirates is not so straightforward. Before I say
anymore on this point, I should underline that it nevertheless is a good
thing that the Pirate Pary now enters the EU parliament. European and
national legal authorities and the industry lobbyists will have a harder
time to portray their political opponents as mere thieves subject to law
enforcement. With this victory, the intellectual property question has
decisevly moved in to the charmed circle of liberal, parliamentary
deliberation. While that is important in many respects, in my opinion,
it is insufficient to win the appraisal of a critical, leftist public.
The ideology of the representatives of piratedome needs be weighten in
in an account of the political significance of Internet piracy.

Since there is no single body representing the Swedish pirate movement,
my account of the political ideas of its different branches are
necessarily an approximation. That is particularly true of the
grassroots members, milions and milions of filsharers who rally, like so
many other cohorts in consumer society, behind the demand for lower
prices. It is a safe guess that the majority of them are at best dimly
aware of the political ideas attached to piracy. Still, without the mass
violation of copyright law enacted by these people for opportunistic
reasons, the political relevance of the spokespeople of piratedome would
have been null. The active members championing piracy can be divided
into three main forks, the parliamentary fraction, i.e. The Pirate Party
(PP), the organic intellectuals of the blogosphere with Piratbyrån (PB)
as a main hub, and the entreprenueral fraction, The Pirate Bay (TPB).
Here it becomes meaningful to talk about shared, ideological
convictions, even though it requires of us to read the pirate movement
against the grain of its own self-epresentations.

The millennial-political dreams attached to the Internet as a whole in
the 90's came to an abrupt end with the IT-bubble. During the first half
of 00's, an echoe of those dreams lingered on but in the more restricted
domain of the blogosphere. Piratedome has given new lease to these two
receding waves of hype, and, subsequently, shares many of the same
defaults. Perhaps the pirate movement can be said to differ on one
crucial point, namely in having re-discovered antagonism in
cyberpolitics. To adress Geert Lovink and Ned Rositer recent posting on
this matter: The court case against TPB demonstrates how antagonism
springs forth from the plesure principle once the social network goes
bit-torrent on private property. However, the heritage of the Swedish
pirate movement in the dot-com universe shines through in that the
spokespeople of piratedome deny that the conflicts in which they are
involved has anything to do with ownership, accumulation of capital, and
the like. This is the bottom line of the often repeated statement of
faith: That the politics of piracy cuts along an entirely different axis
than the (now out-dated) division between left-right.

That this hypothesis has purchase in the first branch of the Swedish
pirate movement, i.e. the Pirate Party, can easily be tested. Before and
after the EU-election, the forefigures of the  party have stated in
interview after interview in Swedish newspapers that they do not side
with any established, political coalision. Trying to claim the middle
ground of the electorate is a common, parliamentary tactic in the
post-"third way" era and the same move has previously been attempted by
other newly established political parties in Sweden (the green party,
the feminist party) In those earlier cases, the claim rang hollow
because of a clear leftist demography in the member base. The PP seems
to differ, however, in that the claim about having advanced beyond the
left-right divide is, as far as I can tell, widely believed in by both
the leaders and the members. Putting it less generously, the agnostic
attitude in regards to left-right issues is not just required of the PP
in order to win key votes on the margin, it has also become a necessity
for holding together its loose aliance of supporters with convictions
ranging from neo-liberal to socialist. If PP can serve as a template of
political movements to come, then it seems that the possibility of
adressing contested class interests in the future hinges on that those
issues are reformulated in a technocratic language purged from leftist
alarm words. In spite of this, however, one cannot fail to notice that
the first and the second man in command of the PP, Rick Falkvinge and
Christian Engström, both have a former engagement in the libertarian and
liberal right. The party leader, Rick Falkvinge, was formerly a member
of the youth organisation of the Swedish conservative right (Moderata
Ungdomsförbundet) but left the organisation because the party was in his
opinion too much "social liberal", and he is still calling himself an
ultra-capitalist. Christian Engström, who is the person most likely to
be sent to Brussels, is a drop-out from another centre-right liberal
party (Folkpartiet).

As for the second arm of the Swedish pirate movement, i.e. the
blogosphere, it is harder to give a precise reading of its political
colour from the cacophony of opinions. Anyway, having now followed the
discussions over a period of five years, my impression is that among the
blogs which carry heavy trafic and have high visibility, they either
claim to have surpassed the right-left divide altogether (often
expressed in the Deleuzian sound-bytes that were in vouge on the
contintent in the 90's and chastised by Richard Barbrook in his essay
'The Holy Fools'), or they openly announce an, often idiosyncratic,
neo-liberal interpretation of the world. Pro-pirate blogers with leftist
sympathies have become more vocal in the last few years. But it is fair
to say that the political left has been marginal (and marginalised) in
formulating the agenda of the pirate scene in Sweden, quiet unlike some
other countries on the European continent where the copy-fight discourse
has been influenced by autonomist terminology (general intellect,
post-fordism, etc).

Finally, as concerns the core team behind the Pirate Bay, if judged by
their own statements, one of them, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, has declared
himself a supporter of  the Ayn Rand-ish the Classic liberal party,
another, Peter Sunde, is a recent member of the green party, while the
third is awovedly apolitical. Then there is of course the financial
backer, Carl Lundström, whose coulours are quite clear from his generous
donations to far right, anti-immigration parties in Sweden. I grant that
this latter point has been stretched beyond the breaking point by the
mass media, quite possibly as a guilt-by-association strategy to tar the
more fundamental questions at stake. The lasting impression is rather
that the entrepreneurs behind TPB service have not much looking like a
political conviction at all, not even in matters of intellectual
property. When two authors, Anders Rydell och Sam Sundberg, recently
published a book about the Swedish pirate movement, they used the TBP
logotyp on the front cover, a pirate ship. It provoked an idignant
response from Peter Sunde who felt that their trademark had been
violated. History repeats itself. Once upon a time, Shawn Fanning tried
to prevent a fan from selling T-shirts with the Napster logotype (a cat
with headphones). This political adventure sailes on a gigantic wave of
opportunism, from the apolitical consumers downloading music only to get
things for free, to the equally apolitical administrators of the
service. The safest bet about such an endevour is that while many are
working hard to campaign the issues at stake, someone else is going to
be laughing all the way to the bank.

Hence, the statements of political fidelity only tells us so much, and,
at the final instance, the analysis has to home in on the position of
piracy, and, more specifically, The Pirate Bay, in advanced, liberal
capitalism. The revenues made from advertising on the TPB website
remains clouded in mystery. An estimate by the major Swedish newspaper
Svenska Dagbladet in 2006 was about 10,000 euros each month, a sum
likely to have increased considerably with growing media exposure. The
prosecution estimated in 2008 that the venture made 3,000,000 dollar in
profit annually, based on internal e-mail communication between the
three entrepreneurs and their agency in Israel. What is interesting here
is that for a long time, the folk behind TPB pretended that they were
not making any profits at all from their service. They portrayed the
venture as an grassroots movement motivated on ideological grounds.
Indeed, until the disclosure in news media of the fact that large
profits were made from advertisments, TPB was asking their supporters
for donations, and, according to their own estimates, they earned about
600 euros a month in this way.

My pessimistic reading of the situation is, then, that TPB, just as with
earlier instances of profit-making filesharing services harking all the
way back to Napster, must be seen as experiments of a new form of
exploitation in libertarian capitalism. While established companies are
trying to reinvent themselves into sects (corporate cultures etc), TPB
eats away from the other end of the rope, it is a grassroots movement
in-becoming a profit-making venture. Under the jolly roger, it can milk
the subjectivity of its followers/labourers like no
corporate-culture-enhanced firm possibly could hope for. The filesharing
network has brought the "attention economy"-business model of "free
content, free labour" to its apex. The distribution of revenues in TPB
between capital (the entreprenuers + the agencies administrating the
advertising service + the ISP companies) and labour (the labour power of
the artists plus the audience power of the filesharers, with a nod to
Dallas Smyhthe) is truly prophetic and probably outdoes even the current
IP system in producing inequality.

The "organical intellectuals" of the pirate movement have been reluctant
to enter into this kind of discussion (the exception are those few who
declare themselves as belonging to the political left). Ironically,
given the common claim in the blogosphere that it is providing a
democratic, decentralised mode of journalism more resistant towards
censorship than the old, centric forms of news meda, information about
the profits made by the TPB entrepreneurs did not travel very fast in
the blogosphere. News about it resided for about two weeks in the
outskirts of the commentary fields until one major newspapers (Svenska
Dagbladet) got scant of the information. This reflects back on the claim
that the pirate movement stands beyond the right/left divide. What it
says is basically that questions about intellectual property, the
Internet etc. are detached from the main point of contestation between
the right and the left, i.e. how economical resources in society should
be distributed. But this statement is nothing but a variation of the
notion of "the death of ideologies", a rhetorcial concept which has been
touted by the right since the 1950s and 1960s. It is here remerged once
more, precisely in order to avoid the problematic at the heart of the
intellectual property question, namely: how the economic gains made in
the industry from the introduction of information technology should be
distributed in society between capital and labour.

Johan Söderberg





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