On the Digital Pirates

A note from the pirates featured
in Steal This Film

"Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century.” – Mark Getty, The Economist (March 2, 2000) 

“They think that US jurisdiction stretches around the world.” – Frederik Neij, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, in Steal This Film 

“The files have been shared; there’s no way back.” -- Sebastian Lutgert, of Pirate Cinema, in Steal This Film

The quotes above come from Steal This Film, a 2006 documentary that explores the rise of bittorent file sharing and its legal and political consequences. (Here’s the Wikipedia entry for the documentary.) As the bittorrent pirates interviewed in Steal This Film argue, bittorrents are about more than not wanting to pay for music. The fight over online piracy represents a clash of wills and ethics that reflects a larger question: who owns what on the internet? Further, the bittorent discussion acts as a microcosm for the theoretical and geopolitical consequences of intellectual property and networks.


But what exactly is at stake? Those quoting Getty in Steal This Film argue that Getty is “declaring war, a strange kind of war.” And, in some ways, I think they’re right: among the chief contentions between the governments of China and the United States lies the prevalence and ease with which American made films are pirated and sold in the streets of Chinese cities. Intellectual property certainly creates geopolitical problems. As James Boyle argues in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind lawmakers seem to recognize the political difficulties of filesharing to the exclusion of any other conversation about the practice: “In the middle of the most successful and exciting experiment in nonproprietary, distributed creativity in the history of the species, our policy makers can see only the threat from ‘piracy’” (248).

I think, though, that Getty is doing more than declaring war; he is also pointing to the importance of intellectual property for making things run in the 21st century. And the pirates agree: intellectual property is perhaps the single most important issue of the internet age. Copying, they argue, is not illegal or immoral; it is a way of interrupting the economy of scarcity that privileges the makers at the expense of everyone else. As Lawrence Lessig argues in his 2004 book Free Culture, restrictive intellectual property and copyright law “controls not just the creativity of commercial creators but effectively that of anyone. Although that expansion would not matter much if copyright law regulated only ‘copying,’ when the law regulates as broadly and obscurely as it does, the extension matters a lot” (19). In other words, lawmakers aren't well versed enough in the ways of the web to write the kind of limited, targeted laws that might simultaneously protect users and producers.

Though the internet is new(-ish), the debate about mediums that grant more people access to once scarce resources is not a new one. Until the 19th and 20th centuries, the vast majority of the European and American populace could neither read nor write; only a select few had access to the necessary training, time, equipment and knowledge to communicate via written language. The printing press changed things, though: the masses now had increased access to texts and reading and writing become more common place. Many of the pirates interviewed for Steal This Film argue that the digital copying is simply the latest iteration of the same battle between the moneyed producers and the rest of us. As Lessig argues, “Rip, mix, and burn. This is a kind of creativity. It is a creativity that we should remember and celebrate. There are some who would say that there is no creativity except this kind” (24). There is nothing new under the sun. Everything is an iteration. Those who create and run bittorent sites have an ethics of their own, one that embraces iterative creativity and the possibilities of opening the internet while ignoring the what they see as restrictive copyright laws.

Upon the release of the second Steal This Film, the “League of Noble Peers,” who directed and edited both films, put it this way: “People always ask us, who are The League of Noble Peers? And we tell them: You are, I am, even your bank manager is... insert yourself here, because we all produce information now, we all reproduce information, we all distribute it.” If we accept their premise, that we are all producers, reproducers, and distributors of knowledge via the internet, then their ethics makes sense: anyone who seeks to limit the information available on the internet becomes the enemy of the internet itself. Of course, things aren’t that simple: it goes too far to say that the MPAA is the enemy of the internet, and it’s overly simplistic to say that information wants to be free, so it should be free. Still, painting the bittorent community as a bunch of feckless, greedy thieves belies the complex relationship between many founders of bittorrent sites and the music, movies, and other data files they host.