tech_talk: installation_0
Students:
Let me tell you a little goddamn story once:
Creation closes doors. That’s what the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the rest of the Media Industrial Complex (M.i.C.) would have you believe. Since the advent of digital media, these criminal corporate organizations have bribed lawmakers, bullied information services companies, extorted the American public and sued and imprisoned those who they deem criminal.
This in the name of protecting the alleged rights of their clientele: musicians and filmmakers etc. The rights in question are property rights, and the property in question is “Intellectual Property” (IP), an ill-defined term. In 2008, Congress created the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act as a means of promoting their definition of this term, one that sides rather squarely with that of the MiC. According to Victoria Espinel, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at the White_House, “Intellectual property are [sic] the ideas behind inventions, the artistry that goes into books and music, and the logos of companies whose brands we have come to trust.”
WTF?
There is a huge distance between a company logo and the abstract concepts which give life to inventions and art, namely that one is a beautiful and complex function exclusive to the human consciousness and the other is a fucking corporate logo. But it is this very distance that provides the necessary torque to leverage public support for fascist legal precedent on behalf of the MiC and against the freedom of everyone.
As a result of this legal kinship between world governments and the MiC, copyright laws (copyright: historically used to denote the ownership of certain trade secrets, currently bent and misused to denote IP) were updated in countries around the world to protect ideas, artistry, and logos. Unfortunately and not unexpectedly, these laws, while protecting the rights of the MiC, trampled the rights of individuals and smaller organizations who wanted to have ideas or make art. This sparked a world-wide debate surrounding copyright law. “Should the ‘pataphor of property be extended to include ideas, artistry, and logos?” the infosphere queried. (‘pataphor: a pseudo-analogy used to demarcate that which lies beyond the realm of metaphor)
In recent months, this debate reached a new level of violence. Once a cabal of Suits sophisticating the delicate nuance of copyright law, the MiC now takes the George Walker Bush approach, with rogue tech firms as their Blackwater. While the rest of the world Napster’d their way into a warez-topia (warez: a 1337 name for illegal software and such (1337: leet, as in leet-speak )(leet: elite, as in elite hacker)), these Suits instituted anti-piracy legislation which instantly criminalized a large percentage of the internet population (piracy: “a too benign term that doesn’t even begin to adequately describe the toll that music theft takes” (according to the RIAA)).
Case in point: consider Aiplex, a company which specializes in medical billing transcription and making websites appear better in Google searches. In order to improve revenue they recently introduced a new service: illegally shutting down other organization’s web sites via DDOS attacks (DDOS: “distributed denial of service; a method of attacking a computer system by flooding it with so many messages that it is obliged to shut down” (according to the poets at Dictionary.com)).
In the month of August, the MPAA hired Aiplex to attack The Pirate Bay servers at www.piratebay.org Pirate Bay is a very popular and highly controversial bittorrent indexing site (bittorrent: a way to get files from teh internetz). They have been involved in many copyright and licensing lawsuits and have been exposed to a number of raids by Swedish authorities. Even still, they continue to operate, calling themselves “the most resilient bittorrent site” on the internet.
The attack funded by MPAA brought down the site for a number of days and was one of the first major criminal attacks proven to be perpetrated by the M.i.C.
Consider again: ACS:Law, a UK based firm that, since 2009, has been dedicated to filing suit against individuals they claim to be illegally sharing files on the internet. They have sued thousands of people and intend to sue 25,000 more. A recent leak of internal corporate information showed that
ACS:Law used illegally obtained information to target the defendants, violating one law (the UK’s Data Protection Act) so that the they could find out which of these users was violating another (the Copyright Designs and Patents Act).
Well, that’s too bad. But thank the flying spaghetti monster for the rampant anarchy governing the blag-o-sphere. In response to these attacks by MiC, the mob known as Anonymous (of 4chan and Scientology fame), has been organizing retaliatory attacks against the MPAA, ACS:Law and others, DDOS’ing their servers for days and days. For many members of Anon, the rationale is simple: The MiC’s idea of Intellectual property and the licenses that they use to control it go too far. And their response has been powerful and with effect:
“OH SNAP!”
And now you are thinking, “Holy Fuuuuuuuuu... Crazy! How do I feel about this?”
We will tell you:
0. You are pro-piracy of course because as Greeners you are adamantly opposed to the oppressive MiC and their bullshit, let alone the fact that you don’t, as a matter of course, recognize 0s and 1s as the IP the MiC demands you would. Assertions about the legitimicy of IP are used by profiteers to retain ownership of information. Ranging from certain large prime numbers, to the genetic code for propriety species of corn, the umbrella definition for IP has too much coverage for you to support it.
1. Simultaneously, you are an advocate of alternative licenses such as CreativeCommons and the like. These non-commercial licences appropriately consider both authors’ rights to protect their works from profiteering as well as patrons’ rights to use the media as they wish.
2. Contrarily (to 0) and contrapositively (to 1), you are vehemently opposed to opportunists who would break copyleft by selling for a profit works which are protected from such sales under non-commercial licenses.
3. As pseudo-Anarchists, you vehemently support autonomous vigilante action (re: the HCC/ACC occupations of last year) and would be both inconsistent and remiss if you chastised any other autonomous persons or group thereof for similar actions.
4. Finally, as artists, the vacant and aesthetically-worthless works of the mainstream media disgust you. You look down on everyone and hence (and especially) on the subset of people who think enough of these pieces to steal them.
Morally, we’re all outraged at the corporations. They’re fucked and shit only gets more so under their dominion. But how is what they’re doing here any different from what Anon did in response? (Hint: it’s literally not.) The fact of the matter is that the internet is the wild west and anything goes. Power on the tubes is quantified in millions of bots (bots: compromised systems used by hackers and corporate-hackers alike to launch attacks such as the above-mentioned DDOS). If you want cut and dry stories with easily identifiable morals then go work in print media. The internet is messy and that’s how we like it.
And herein lies the conundrum:
:0 ;* 0_0
In conclusion, the future is now.
We must hack the planet for our child-processes, for our child-processes’ child-processes.
This is u$3r/pa$$ and rootcanal signing off from the front lines of the underground
References:
4chan.com/b/
creativecommons.org
slashdot.org
xkcd.com/123/
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/dg1pq/people_dont_seem_to_understa...
http://www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf