Cons in the panopticon: Anti–globalization and cyber–piracy by Indhu Rajagopal with Nis Bojin
This paper examines the paradox of the digital telecommunications revolution that augured the transcendence of big business and big government (Toffler, 1980), but also extended to the World Wide Web the processes of privatization and commodification. Instead of facilitating individuals to design, through interactive technology, their own media and directly express their will (Pool, 1983), the Internet has come to embody a panopticon [1] that extends the reach of corporatists [2]. We discuss the panopticon in the context of the globalizing cyber–technology, and argue that piracy is an anti–globalization movement.
Contents
Introduction
Review of literature and conceptual themes
Panopticon
Dialectics of cyber–piracy
Conclusion
Introduction
If we apply William Mitchell's [3] notion of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to globalization, we can see how, in relation to cyber–technology, the panopticon operates on the Internet. We examine in this paper Mitchell's arguments relating to piracy as an anti–globalization movement. A variant of panopticon, proposed by Jeremy Bentham [4], had a single master in the middle, surrounded by a circle of six monitors to keep order, then circular tiers with seats for nine hundred boys [5] (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon.
Mitchell (1997) notes that "the digital telecommunications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form," have locked us into the corporate capitalists' technologists, "imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communities that we will want to have." Pursuing Mitchell's questions on the global arena, we may ask: Why should we care about who originates and who spreads the global digital technology? Its significance is too obvious. In the digital era, the panopticon globally monitors, and profoundly affects, the economic, social and political relationships between individuals and corporate capitalists. In resistance to the globalization of corporate control over the cyber–world, piracy and the gift economy have evolved as anti–global resistance movements [6]. We discuss in this paper how piracy — that has been labeled by corporate capital as illegal — can be deemed as an anti–globalization movement led by those who break the proprietary cyber–technology codes.
ICT has accelerated the globalization of prurient forces such as the production and dissemination of pornography, market scams, spam, and vicious virtual viruses. Dialectically, it has also fostered ethical and moral causes across the globe ...
This paper does not address the ethical, moral, or legal dimensions of cyber–piracy although they have serious implications for global socioeconomic values. Our focus is on globalization that the cyber–revolution has accelerated manifold, and on the challenges to it that have emerged in various forms, on both side of the digital ethical, moral, and legal divide. Indeed, ICT has accelerated the globalization of prurient forces such as the production and dissemination of pornography, market scams, spam, and vicious virtual viruses, formulae for bomb making and nuclear proliferation. Dialectically [7], it has also fostered ethical and moral causes across the globe, e.g., knitted anti–global protest movements for social justice, bridged the digital divide in the production and the dissemination of medical technology, scientific knowledge, generic drugs, and educational research, between the haves and have–nots. Our quest is to examine what the digirati are able to create for all those who reach out to ICT for their own needs. Cyber–piracy unleashes the creativity of digirati, and extends cyber–technologies to cater to various wants and desires in the global community, not the least of them being a post–industrial gift economy of sharing, where participants see propriety controls as outmoded.
Concepts and explanations
Some special terms used in this paper require explanation. Piracy is adapted from the context of plundering on the high seas, and applied to the Web as a metaphor for illegally acquiring and distributing goods on the Internet, copyrights of which are infringed by interlopers (Wikipedia, 2004d). The term 'piracy' is not used here to refer to the sale of physical media containing pirated codes or software on the black market. Indeed, such goods come to the market as a result of Internet pirate distribution. However, we only examine the process of piracy on the Internet, rather than the products on the market. Piracy is structurally well–organized on the Internet as layers or echelons of operations with distinct roles at each level. These echelons are identified with layers of distinct functions that each performs in the chain of Internet–facilitated piracy distribution. These echelons often work dialectically with each other in garnering and disseminating pirated materials, particularly with respect to larger forms of digital goods that may exceed several hundred megabytes. The diagrammatic representation we have presented here (Figure 2) should be read not as a rigid hierarchy, but as a general mapping of piracy production and distribution based on an empirical conceptualization. The important levels described here account for a majority of distribution patterns and transactions of pirated materials through the Internet.
The term 'warez' [8] refers to all pirated goods, whether they are software, games, or music. Other warez–related items are also affixed with a 'z' at their end, such as 'crackz' which are patches that allow the bypassing of software copy protections and 'serialz' which are illegally distributed key codes that permit access to the software. Those warez generally referred to as '0-day' are typically acquired for distribution within a day of their original release. Connotations of the term '0-day' that appears on the site, include warez items' anticipated short availability on Web sites, urging one to download it before its impending deletion.
There is an important distinction between hackers and crackers. 'Crackers' are typically those whose expertise is to reverse–engineer copyright protections of software, while 'hackers' can generally be perceived as technological explorers who tinker and play with computer systems, either locally or via the Internet. Hackers themselves are not necessarily malevolently motivated, as some hack mainly for freeing information, or for lifting technological boundaries, while others may deliberately hack to vandalize.
Gnutella and Direct Connect are two peer–to–peer [9] file–sharing programs. Each uses different methods to achieve its goals, but they are both similar to Napster, the once popular music–sharing program, in functionality and searching techniques. Bit Torrent, an application programmed by software developer Bram Cohen, is a tool also used for file–sharing [10]. It is designed to facilitate peer–to–peer exchanges by requiring downloaders to share their uploading bandwidth capacity with one another in the communal pursuit of the same file. Thus, Bit Torrent is a client program that harnesses its user's typically underutilized upload capacity in order to speed up downloading at any given time.
File transfer protocol (FTP) sites refers to computers that are operated as servers for the purpose of file exchange and Internet–accessible archiving. Typically computer users with substantial hard disk space and an Internet connection potentially could establish their own FTP servers, although to process large size transactions regularly, massive storage capacity, preferably equipped with high bandwidth, is necessary to process large size transactions regularly. In relation to FTP sites, the term 'couriers' is used to refer to those who competitively upload files to FTP sites or exchange files between these sites in order to speed up the propagation of newly pirated releases. Couriers competitively operate in a great rush to establish links between an FTP site with a newly pirated release that another FTP site does not have, or vice versa, and negotiate the mutual transfer of files.
Review of literature and conceptual themes
Globalization
"Globalization is a multifaceted process, and can be characterized as a systematic decline in the barriers to the cross–national flow of products, factors (capital and people), values and ideas" [11].
Globalization has rapidly advanced in the post–World War II era, which was previously linked under colonialism. Financial, commercial, cultural, and technological integration of the world accelerated with the ever–expanding integration of global policies under the various agencies of the United Nations. In this paper, we focus on ICT and its impact on globalization. Cristiano Antonelli (2003) compares ICT with previous radical technologies [12], and sees it as a combination of product and process innovations that embody the innovating countries' structural and cultural characteristics. Commodification and profitability have driven the seemingly 'free' Internet around the planet. In order to understand the implications of technology in a globalized world, we draw upon Judy Wajcman's (2002) discussion of the changing social theories and paradigms and the centrality of social variable. She notes that Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) initiated the study of the sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn's central premise in the paradigm of scientific knowledge exposes the profound influence of society where scientific findings and technological discoveries are conducted. The imperative of social interest in the design and in the technical aspects of the process and product of knowledge is more significant than the necessary technical reasons related to the creation and production of any technology (Law and Hassard, 1999; MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999) [13]. Wajcman (2002) cautions that the technological impact on social shaping merely simulates the existing conditions of our mundane world in spite of many thrilling new discoveries in cyberspace. As no new societies can be created in the cyber–sphere, all that technological discoveries can do is to alter the social relations within the global political economy.
Commodification of the Internet
Commodification occurs when, through a deliberate or non–deliberate process, a non–commodity e.g., an idea, a propensity, a desire, an intellectual curiosity, identity, or gender, is transformed into a commodity. Generally these thoughts or social constructs are not considered exchangeable in market terms, but are attributed a monetary value through this process (Wikipedia, 2004b). In essence, commodification means commercializing relationships previously not encompassed by market relations or by exchange transactions. The term came into currency in 1977, and it was central to the understanding of how capitalism advances (Marxist Internet Archive, 2004). Commercialization of work, goods, and social relations is a process that ensures the dominance of capital in producing and exchanging commodities for profit.
"The bourgeoisie ... has resolved personal worth into exchange value ... it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation ... [it has] torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation." (Marx and Engels, 1848).
If we treat information as a proprietary good, we commodify information, and create ownership and control regimes. In such a commercial milieu, information becomes unaffordable to the workers and to poorer people. When communication, music, and knowledge are commercialized on the Internet, they are bought and sold in the information market on the Internet, proprietarily commoditized for its consumers (Rajagopal and Bojin, 2004).
Pieter Boeder (2005) examines the dramatic changes to the public sphere that is under siege through commodification of the Internet, and the way in which these striking changes threaten the very existence of the public sphere on the Internet. William Mitchell (1997) names them 'electronic agoras':
"The keyboard is my café ... Traditionally, you needed to go someplace to do this sort of thing — to the agora, the forum, the piazza, the café, the bar, the pub, Main Street, the mall, the beach, the gym, the bathhouse, the college dining hall, the common room, the office, or the club — and where you went pegged your peer group, your social position, and your role. It also framed expectations about how you should represent yourself by your clothing, body language, speech, and behavior and about the interactions that were to take place. Each familiar species of public place had its actors, costumes, and scripts. But the worldwide computer network — the electronic agora — subverts, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban life."
Media monopolies and full–fledged commodification of intellectual artifacts challenge the milieu that has long been characterized by a global free flow of information, discursive dialogues, dissemination of knowledge, and freedom of speech on the Web. Boeder argues that "discourse [has] degenerated into publicity, and publicity used the increasing power of electronic media to alter perceptions and shape beliefs. What dies in this process is the rational discourse at the base of civil society" [14].
Richard Barbrook (2000) analyzes extensively the roots of market worship and the forces that have led to the commodification of the Internet, and notes that theorists such as Toffler (1980), and Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983) assumed that technological advancements in the media industries would liberate people from corporatist clutches. Since the French Revolution of 1789, the process of modernization under the hegemony of reactionaries has been making rapid strides. However, by taking a leap to the 1970s when economies collapsed, Barbrook notes that the emergent bourgeoisie were the digirati who were expected to transform the Internet into a free haven of information society and the notion of representative democracy assumed by personal participation in the 'electronic town hall.' They were digerati who became neo–liberals and hacker geniuses. Discussing the optimism among liberals, Barbrook adds that many of them (Toffler, 1980; Kelly, 1994; Hudson, 1996; Dyson, 1997) figured out that the question was, as Rossetto (Hudson, 1996) summarized, not the "Not haves and have–nots, [but have–nows and] have–laters." The lure for temporarily accommodating the tyranny of the minority was the hope that, in the long run, as Henri de Saint–Simon suggested, it would lead to material and moral goods (Saint–Simon and Halevy, 1975). Barbrook lists the parallels between industrial capitalism and cybercommunism [15]. He finds that the Internet satisfies its users not as a market, but as a gift economy: spontaneously giving and receiving information as gifts. The knowledge–creating sector of the economy, the university, has offered scholarly research results in the 'commons' and anyone could take, and benefit from, them. As a result of these established practices in academia, the gift economy has been embedded within the social mores of the Internet. Hobbyists and the general public have joined these researchers to bring information into the public forum of free knowledge. Each contributed one's discourse or information for free, and also accessed others' knowledge for free. Those who developed the Internet did not envisage it as an exchange for commodified information, and hence hard–wired it as a dynamic free–exchange commons. However, the market economy crept in to control this gift exchange of intellectual labour through 'copyright' [16]. Barbrook (2000) reiterates what Porter (1995), Frow (1996), and May (1998) cautioned earlier, that copyright transformed intellectual labour and information into commodities. However, the Internet that has not lost its verve of freedom, has catalyzed the exuberant programmers who have created Open Source [17] and non–proprietary ICT artifacts, and customized them for free distribution [18].
If we treat information as a proprietary good, we commodify information, and create ownership and control regimes. In such a commercial milieu, information becomes unaffordable to the workers and to poorer people.
Andrea Bonaccorsi and Cristina Rossi (2004) recently surveyed the motivations of developers of Open Source, and compared their results with earlier surveys (Ghosh, et al., 2002; Hertel, et al., 2003; Hars and Ou, 2002). Consistently all these surveys find that the developers emphasize their interest in designing Open Source as emancipation from corporatist proprietary software. Developers' interests are not geared to gaining fame, but to advancing challenging skills, developing human capital, and freely distributing the resultant products, because they disdain corporate commodification of knowledge processes on the Internet, which has become a global public sphere.
Jürgen Habermas (1962) notes that the public sphere is a phenomenon that emerged after the breakdown of religious hegemony and the rise of the middle class in the eighteenth century. Since then, private individuals and property owners regulated public authority, and shaped the public sphere. However, nineteenth–century discursive reasoning and informed public opinion have been relegated by mass consumption, commercialization of mass participation, and publicity as a form of entertainment. Habermas provoked free discussions on issues of commodification of art in public forums, e.g., in coffeehouses, and as discourses in weeklies. More importantly, his discourses advanced public discussions of private opinions and narratives by legitimizing a new literary genre, viz., the publication of intimate and personal correspondence. Thus a form of "literary public sphere" emerged. Habermas warns that mass media and monopoly capitalist organizations have gained control over the public sphere, turning it into a nominal and impotent forum and rendering its participants powerless (Holub, 1997; Wikipedia, 2004c).
Under copyright laws, intellectual property has inevitably been transformed into a commodity. In the early periods, 'fair use' in public interest restricted the absolute ownership of information. However, toward the end of the twentieth century, these conditionalities have gradually dropped off under the rigorous enforcement of copyright legislation by hi–tech industries, media conglomerates, and communication empires (Barbrook, 2002).
Panopticon
Writing about Foucault's theories on "the Net as a panopticon," Mark Winokur (2003) discusses the "visible surveillance on the Net ... to studies of such phenomena as information–gathering about individuals (e.g.: Carnivore software)" but Foucault's theorization does not deal with "data encryption ... spatialization, totality of experience, coercive discourse, and ambiguous/internalized authority — are not frequently linked to the Internet." Neo–Foucauldian critics examine the use of ICT as a surveillance instrument of the invisible oligarchy in which power is invisibly vested in the form of an Orwellian 1984 or Kafkaesque Castle. The Internet is surveillant, and it assists the monitors — corporations and the rulers — to know citizens and consumers better through Internet spying. Winokur argues that the Internet technologies shape individuals, their tastes, their hobbies, their work and their existence to the extent that it may turn into a body of knowledge that becomes a means of coercion. David Lyon (1994) emphasizes that one cannot locate or avoid the authoritarian gaze that collects data on, and coerces, the Internet user.
What then are the techno–tools of this gaze through the Internet? Tom Brignall (2002) argues that the Internet is inherently a panopticon because the Internet service providers are equipped by technology to monitor their online customers without their being aware of it. The Internet observers go beyond the 'jailers' envisaged in Jeremy Bentham's panopticon because of wireless technology and its global reach. Already global programs like America Online, Prodigy, and Microsoft Online monitor their users' habits, culture, activities and transactions, and claim that they are not violating any law. They all gather private personal information through their intrusive software [19]. For those who argue that piracy is emancipatory whether monitoring one's privacy was deliberate or not, Brignell's rejoinder is that peer–to–peer networking would lead to global corporations' monitoring Internet users because of the trend among conglomerates like BMG, Sony and Warner/AOL to make deals with peer–to–peer networks in order to control the flow of digital media.Those who developed the Internet did not envisage it as an exchange for commodified information, and hence hard–wired it as a dynamic free–exchange commons.
Spyware [20] is a sort of panoptic tool on the Internet, which can intrusively extract information and provide it to servers of software companies and others. The Internet can be used by the state's older institutions and forces that are charged with the responsibility of maintaining order in society. Beyond this spectrum of controls, as Adorno and Horkheimer note,
"Tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do, or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us. Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore, spiritually to be self employed" [21].
Another panoptic raid against one's privacy is through Adware programs that include spyware [22]. While viewing a pop–up advertisement, one may be unaware of the spyware collecting and sending information from your hard drive. While downloading peer–to–peer files, a user may also be downloading a large number of spyware and adware programs. Yet, another danger is systemware that downloads itself through peer–to–peer networks. This program facilitates the company that owns the download to "use unused storage space, unused computing power and/or Internet bandwidth/Internet access for the aggregation of content and use in distributed computing. The user acknowledges and authorizes this use without the right of compensation" (Duke, 2002).
Colin J. Bennett (2001) points out that "a more sophisticated form of surveillance by design is revealed through ... banner-advertising." Doubleclick, an advertising company on the Web, performs as an agent in marketing advertisement space on behalf of various Web sites, and it also disseminates and services such ads. When ads run on Web sites, their visitors are monitored, while Doubleclick's proprietary software collects surfers' habits, products they visit, and information they provide. Bennett notes:
"Any website that knows your identity and has a cookie for you could set up procedures to exchange their data with the companies that buy advertising space from them, synchronizing the cookies they both have on your computer. This possibility means that once your identity becomes known to a single company listed in your cookies file, any of the others might know who you are every time you visit their sites. This identity might become known by filling in a warranty, product registration, survey or purchase form" [23].
Carnivore is another raider program, a more controversial one developed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow the FBI to spy online, tracing e–mail activities of suspected criminals. Often one is reminded of the tactics reminiscent of those in George Orwell's book 1984 (Tyson, 2004). Carnivore is a sophisticated wiretapping/eavesdropping program which chews all the data on the network, although it eats only the information authorized by a court order (Graham, 2004).
It would seem that cookies are innocuously embedded in computers for the speed of surfing Web pages we access often and that they do not act maliciously on our computers. Cookies are text files that can be deleted at any time and are not plug–ins or programs. However, cookies are relevant to the issues of surveillance because they are software that compromises user's privacy and anonymity on the Internet. Cookies may not read your hard drive to find out information about you, but personal information that you give to a Web site, including credit card information, will be stored in a cookie unless you have turned off the cookie feature in your browser. Thus cookies are problematic to privacy (see Webopedia).
Free programs like Gnutella allow open entry into users' programs and content on another user's hard drive. Because there is no revolt from the users who are interested in downloading what they want from Gnutella user groups, it does not mean that spying of a less tech–sophisticated user is not possible via Gnutella. In fact, many peer–to–peer users turn off Gnutella's program Preferences in order not to allow access to their hard drives. Because most peer–to–peer technology relies on open source programming, it is possible for crackers and hackers to create modifications in order to allow illegal access to personal information. Even without peer–to–peer client software, one can easily figure out that crackers could de–compile software, and modify it to suit their interests.
If one assumes that the Internet frees individuals from limitations, i.e., of space, time, and dependence, one must also face the fact that it is an illusion and that inexorable tides of control invisibly flow through the Internet. Brignall points out:
"Such attention to the production of homogeneous cultural artifacts will continue to produce creativeless, bland, and sterile cultural icons such as Brittney Spears and Barney. Any counter pop creative culture will continue to be drowned out if it does not look like a big money maker ... the Internet will be[come] a cultural Leviathan, making sure we do not do anything that would result in fewer profits for multinationals" [24].
Anti–globalization and cyber–piracy
In resistance to globalization, many alternatives identified under the general rubric of anti–globalization movements have emerged. Anti–globalists champion various causes all the way from anti–sweatshops to protests against genetic engineering. They see the various causes spearheaded by diverse groups as complementary to one another, and through the Web, knit together across the globe to carry out their strategies. They view multinational corporations, e.g., Microsoft, as exploitive and stepping on individual rights and human interests by using their global corporate power. Even pro–capitalist economists, like George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz, identify with some aspects of anti–globalism when they argue against centralized world economic policies such as IMF's structural adjustment program (SAP) and World Bank's policies that override local interests of those in poorer countries (Wikipedia, 2004a).
Discussing various examples of anti–globalization movements, Amory Starr and Jason Adams (2003) focus on relocalization or local autonomy as one of the three rubrics of anti–globalization movements: viz., radical reform that aims to undercut corporations, globalization from below (Falk, 1993), and a range of autonomous movements that articulate their productivity, and rights of communities. In the literature on anti–globalization, the autonomy perspective is theoretically rooted in the arguments of "protect the local globally" (Hines, 2000), "delinking" from globalization and self–determination (Amin, 1985) and "scaling back overdevelopment" (Weinberg, 1991).
Revolution and resistance in the cyberworld
In Marxist thought, anti–globalization movements emerge to challenge the fetters that globalization imposes. Under advanced corporate capitalism, according to Karl Marx, dialectics occur between the material forces and social relations of production in cyber–political economy. Social relations of production involve the relation between corporate capitalist ownership of production, and the workers and consumers who have little say on matters relating to the process of production and commodification in the cyber–economy. To quote Marx: "At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production ... with the property relations ... From forms of development of the forces of production, these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes a period of social revolution" [25]. Barbrook (2002) critiques the neo–liberalists' argument that the world has seen the "end of history" (Fukuyama, 1992), as there could be no other alternative socio–economic system, which is based on the hegemonic commercialization now of the Internet. However, the full potential of the Internet cannot be realized within the traditional hierarchies of capitalism. The new social relations of production beyond advanced capitalism are already in conflict with barriers imposed by the forces of production that operate in cyber–economy, resulting in resistance through the gift culture and the thriving of the "intellectual commons" that free–sharing and the anti–globalist actions of piracy have established (Barbrook, 2002).
The full potential of the Internet cannot be realized within the traditional hierarchies of capitalism.
David Tetzlaff's (2000) examination of the Hotline file–sharing community not only elaborates a technological framework of how the file–sharing community operates, but also provides a look at the ethical perspective from which many "pirates" view their activities. Tetzlaff points out that these perspectives range from the personal acknowledgement of piracy as unethical to the militant belief that piracy is a necessary step in the battle for the freedom of information. Through the examples of Hotline, a file–sharing application, newsgroups and warez sites, Tetzlaff outlines the descriptive nature of how piracy operates, and describes a vignette of one section of the chain of pirate distribution that operates through, and is facilitated by, the Internet. However, Internet piracy extends above and beyond the world of file–sharing, newsgroups and warez sites. A long chain of distribution starts at the top with the release groups who acquire and crack a copy of new technological wares, and thus initiate a process which allows the artifacts to trickle down the line to the average downloader. Barry Shore, et al. (2001), differentiate the term "piracy" from "softlifting," defining the former as an activity based on a monetary incentive of selling illegally obtained software, and the latter as limited to downloading software for personal use only. In this paper, we discuss the process of "piracy" on the Internet in broader terms that would include all ICT artifacts that are pirated.
Dialectics of cyber–piracy
For this paper, we gathered information from individuals involved in the piracy chain at various levels. For obvious reasons, they wish to remain anonymous and unidentified. There are three common levels within the cyber–piracy system of any digital cultural goods — music, software or other artifacts — that have been socially and technologically structured: the upper, middle and lower echelons. The upper echelon at the top of the chain produces as a virtual factory: release groups are the architects of the initial cracked pirate release, and FTP sites acting as warehouses for the increased proliferation of that release by couriers (Die.net Online Dictionary, 2004a). The three operative participants — crackers, FTPs, and couriers — get access to nearly any item they want mainly because of their interrelational intimacy with the process. Depending on the size of the release, pirated goods can even make their way directly to the bottom rung to be "file shared," or hosted on warez sites if they are small enough. However, pirated releases, especially those of substantial size, first make their way through the second rung, i.e., through newsgroups or the middle echelon. Newsgroups are the ultimate recycling hub of warez because new materials are always being sent through the top of the chain, and older material is being re–uploaded by newsgroup users themselves. This makes newsgroups a widely accessible method of finding a large quantity of pirated materials. The third or lower echelon of pirate distribution, the file–sharing and warez Web sites, depends highly on having either received pirated software from a newsgroup, IRC or even from warez Web sites or other file sharers on the same stratum.
Whereas newsgroups provide massive amounts of pirated materials that are poorly organized, file–sharing provides significantly less amounts of pirated material in terms of variety, and finding what one needs is a simplified process (Tetzlaff, 2000). Despite the lack of dependability that arises from trying to download files from another user on a file–sharing client or from trying to download a 0–day application from a warez site that may or may not be reliably linked, finding items is relatively easy mainly because of search engines such as Google and the built–in search functions of file–sharing applications and bit torrent trackers. Thus, the third echelon of pirate distribution not only requires the least amount of computer skill to access, but it also provides what is nearly the best method to specifically pinpoint what has ultimately come down the chain of distribution.
The key characteristics of each rung in the piracy chain are their specific qualities that make each rung distinctly useful in the chain. If one wants a new program or game that recently arrived on store shelves or was about to arrive soon, the upper echelon would have it tapped. If one wants the largest smorgasbord of pirated material available to anyone with moderate computer skills, then the second echelon would be the most optimal choice. But if one is looking for a specific small application, video clip, song or reasonably sized releases, but had only a low level of computer skills, the third echelon is the tap. These hierarchic echelons on the Internet do not apply to every item released by a pirate release group. Often, depending on the size and significance of the item, levels are skipped, or releases are simultaneously propagated on all three levels, and pirated goods can also be found moving back and forth between the second and third echelon. However, these are exceptions as they apply only to a relative minority of warez transactions down the chain of distribution. As one can see from this analysis, the top tier directly resists against the Internet's globalization, and burrows into the Internet for commodified products; the second tier accelerates the dissemination of the pirated warez; and, the third tier accomplishes the global distribution of the fruits of anti–globalization.
Drawing from theoretical arguments on anti–globalization, we build a framework of analysis to examine "piracy" as an anti–globalization movement, adapting two of the key conceptual themes in the anti–globalization literature: resistance against commercial hegemony and privatization of the Internet and the establishment of communal autonomy and communal currency on the Internet [26].
Piracy as resistance against commercial hegemony and the privatization of the Internet
Citing John Locke who observes that "The great and chief end of ... men ... putting themselves under Government ... is the preservation of their Property" [27], Richard Barbrook emphasizes how media corporations that vigorously resist state regulation of their activities demand the exercise of state power in criminalizing social mores and software codes. Barbrook argues that, in the guise of copyright, state enforcement of any censorship, whether political or economic, is undesirable. Instead of a democratic state fostering a discursive "intellectual commons" (Barbrook, 2002; Lessig,1999; Hauben and Hauben, 1997) on the Web, the state, by enforcing such corporate demands, is facilitating "the digital panopticon." In this situation, where one–dimensional information would, as Berners–Lee (1998) cautions, be the standard diet for passive consumption, any interactive creativity would be anathema under panopticon's surveillance (Figure 3).
The notion of piracy on the Web is a counter–reaction to the stifling of creativity and access to free resources on the Internet. The greater the commodification of processes and products on, and relating to, the Internet, the less useful and unique will the Internet become. Corporate capital insistently pursues various means: rigorous policing of the Internet through surveillance technology as panopticon, use of the state power, threat of punishment through stringent legislation, and dissemination of McCarthyistic propaganda to enforce commercial copyright and turn the Internet into a web of commodity fetishism.
Corporate capitalist trends in the market inevitably lead to "commodity fetishism," by turning class antagonism into a desire for commodities and for accumulation of capital. To satisfy these never–ending desires and the limitless urge for accumulation, consumerism gives a boost to the world market where businesses engage in the production and sale of goods. Thus the Internet becomes dominated by corporate capitalist enterprises, gets transposed into a conduit and a social shaper of such desires and commodities, and ends up as an extension of the conglomerate media empires (Mosco, 2000), which dismantles the original purpose of the Internet as a public space, a "creative commons" [28].
The technological "Creative Commons" seems to be ineffective. Tom McCourt and Patrick Burkart [29] warn about Napster and free-downloading of music:
"The commercialization of the Internet transforms the experience of on–line music from a network–enabled community of freely participating individuals to a network–delivered commodity that is relentlessly measured and metered."
Europe and U.S. have different approaches to intellectual property rights. While the U.S. model ensures financial rights to media corporations and their artist clients, the European model shores up creator rights to artists, and allows moral rights greater significance than rights for profits. In view of these international barriers to U.S. copyright assumptions, the U.S. multinational media corporations created Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies which enable proprietary "lock up" of content into every OS, artifact, and the player. Further technological advancements such as Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) have been attempted, but they have proved to be code–breakable [30]. Music recordings and dissemination inherently require that artists promote them freely online to their audience in order to popularize themselves as well as their future productions. The "lock in" technologies inhibit such promotions, and also complicate the processes of online sales. The neoliberal state is ever ready to enforce penalties against copyright infringements. Richard Barbrook identifies a humorous posting on the Internet which exemplifies the irony of propaganda against downloading music disseminated by corporate empires — the Recording Industry Association of America (Figure 4) [31].
Establishment of communal autonomy and communal currency on the Internet
Carl Cuneo's classifies the protest process that has emerged in relation to, or from within, the Internet, which we identify here as "anti–globalization" movement, under five categories: "Smash the Internet, Organizing and Protesting Digitally; Software Piracy; the Open Source Movement; and, Hackerdom" [32]. The first two categories — "Smash the Internet" and "Organizing and Protesting Digitally" — are resistance movements against the hegemonic corporations that have usurped the Internet as a powerful infrastructure of globalization. Protesters globally organize via the Internet, and challenge multinational corporations' (MNCs) virtual global expansion, and financial and currency transactions that destabilize LDCs' economies. The third category — "Software Piracy" — describes the acts of those who are assumed to be "digital–have–nots" who acquire access to the information and communication technology (ICT) by disregarding copyright laws. The fourth category embraces the Open Source Movement (OSM) that undercuts the technological roots of corporate capital's role in the privatization of intellectual capital. Linus Torvalds' source code of Linux is freely distributed on the Internet with the freedom for global collective skill to develop it further. Competing against Microsoft, Linux has a 25 percent share of the global server OS market. The fifth category is "hackers or crackers" whom the media labels as criminally inclined; these are sophisticated programmers who use their skills to gain unauthorized access to information. Hackers see themselves as a community with advanced skills that enable them to climb out of their "digital–have–not" position (Cuneo, 2002).
We argue that software piracy — resisting proprietary copyright regulations and ignoring any hegemonic ownership of intellectual capital — is a type of anti–globalization movement. Who is interested in bridging the haves and the have–nots in ICT, and why? Corporate–vested interests expand their commodities and consumerism, as well as acquire a reserved army of technological workers from around the globe (Cuneo, 2002; DiMaggio, et al., 2001). From cradle to grave, free donations of computers, through schools and community centers, promote the Internet culture (Cuneo, 2002; Pellizarri, 2000). Even in poorer countries, one is bombarded with advertisements about what middle classes are missing without access to a computer. There is a rush among the poorer countries to catch up, lest they be left behind in this most radical knowledge revolution since the Industrial Revolution. However, hi–tech corporations have targeted knowledge and information as commodities and as capital in the global market (Cuneo, 2002; Castells, 1996). In resistance to this control, the Internet has become an infrastructure for anti–globalization activities aimed at breaking the oligopolistic proprietary control of hi–tech information systems, i.e., piracy of software, music, videos, and other ICT artifacts.
The piracy chain as resistance against commercial hegemony and privatization of the Internet
The upper echelon: Release groups, FTPs and couriers
In the piracy chain, at the top echelon, the pirates imitate the very capitalistic processes — appropriation and competition — they despise. This occurs despite the fact the term cyber–piracy connotes a process of dismantling proprietary ownership of technology and capitalist commercialization of the Internet, The trafficking of illegally obtained software and games begins with individuals who manage to procure a copy either from a store, or from a leaked source, and who may also have access to a program's source code (Jacobssen and Reiter, 2001). Once a software or game title is released, or is near completion and in the process of moving to store shelves, several piracy "groups," each with identifying titles, are already competing to release their own pirated version of the title before others do. The "drag–race" mentality in the illegal release of a stolen title may often be at the expense of the quality of a program's or game's pirated release. Such an item may embody a poorly "cracked" product, one in which copy protection was not fully removed or nullified, or has other anomalies. Erroneous releases often are deleted, or likely to be "nuked" from source FTP sites, after word of their shortcomings has spread. At all levels, piracy groups are not only highly organized, but also quite untraceable because they remain invisible and keep a low profile.
Piracy groups are usually effective at "reverse engineering" or "cracking" to subvert copy protections of the artifacts. Through this process, the pirated artifact is distributed with an embedded unit of technology, a file known as a "crack" that replaces one of the original program's components, which the user must apply to operate the pirated version. There are few traces of signatures on the Internet or related media, because release groups' operations are confined to acquire, crack, and assign a pirated artifact to a "host," an outside source, and not extend their functions on the Internet beyond this. Release groups never host or distribute their own releases, but leave them to FTP sites. As a result of their invisibility and smallness, release groups are often not caught as the piracy police cannot track their activities efficiently. Therefore, the legal arm of the state is always after those that distribute the artifacts [33].
The greater the commodification of processes and products on, and relating to, the Internet, the less useful and unique will the Internet become.
Release groups have their own couriers, but third–party courier groups also have a unique identity, hierarchical structure, and competitive motivations among their group. Couriers not only compete as groups against each other to sport the quickest uploads to a key server in a "race," but they do so also as individuals to be the first to locate and harness new releases. Statistics are maintained within courier groups in order to determine the groups and the individuals who transfer the most data in order to earn the most FTP credits. Credits are common currency of value among couriers, and this permits them to download material from various FTP sites. These are points that couriers earn in exchange for their timely upload. The prevalent version of exchange of upload to download is a ratio of 1:3, i.e., every 100 MB uploaded or transferred to a site gives one the access to download three times that amount from that same site (Cooper and Harrison, 2001). Couriers earn these credits by exchanging files between servers in a process known as file exchange protocol (FXP). For quick uploading of massive amounts of newly cracked technology to popular FTP sites in the upper echelon warez scene, couriers rely on FXPing to earn their credits, rather than on slower cable connections. Thus, couriers co–exist symbiotically with the higher profile FTP sites brimming with pirated goods, and the speedy release groups, in order to accelerate the propagation of pirated software. There is a remarkable sense of interdependency among the triumvirate in the pirating scene: release groups, couriers, and FTP sites.
The middle echelon: IRC and Usenet
The middle level in the piracy chain depends highly on new content providers at the top level who upload new releases to a newsgroup. Participants of the top echelon feed acquired pirated releases to newsgroups, and/or make them available for exchange on one or a number of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. The middle echelon is, therefore, a critical transition conduit in the chain for proliferating and distributing a number of pirated artifacts. At this level, the piracy community operates with a greater level of autonomy, unrestrained by any formal rules in their world except for informal codes of good behaviour required in dealing with downloading sites.
The middle echelon, the newsgroups, in the piracy chain demonstrates the use of what are otherwise client/server technologies by the pirating community to self–govern the warez exchange process (Barbrook, 2002). Although newsgroups are client/server–based, we witness a movement towards full post–Fordist peer–to–peer autonomy [34], because the users trade and freely provide digital goods amongst each other, using non–peer–to–peer technologies. The middle echelon demonstrates a movement towards full piracy exchange autonomy through the use of the very technology that is built to prevent such exchanges.
Because they are in the middle of the piracy chain, newsgroups tend to be the ultimate recycling hub of warez, because new material continues to flow through the top of the chain, and older or current materials are continually re–uploaded by newsgroup users. Thus newsgroups become a widely accessible method of finding a large quantity of pirated material. Usenet [35] newsgroups are channels for massive reservoirs of unadulterated large releases that could not easily be handled by many other forums. The amount of server space afforded to the average newsgroup service is considerable, and this permits slow, but prolific, uploading and downloading. Usenet groups are quite different from courier groups or FTP sites, and are utilized by a large number of people who both informally trade and also offer up files without expectation of immediate compensation (Figure 5). These groups share many common features with release and courier groups in the upper echelon. Similar in function to Bulletin Board Services (Traphagan and Griffith, 1998), in 2003, Usenet servers not only operate as an Internet–facilitated conduit for pirated software of all sorts — games, movies, music — but, as with many of the groups higher up in the piracy chain, they also maintain an informal measure of order within Usenet. Order and control in a newsgroup are often determined by denying the wants and needs of newsgroup participants. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), in the form of text or Web links, state the rules of a number of newsgroups, the proverbial "dos and don'ts," and group etiquette that users should follow. These are similar to the subtle rules of a chat room, for instance, avoiding usage of caps in a chat room because of its emotive significance comparable to raising one's voice. These rules are not set in stone, and often don't even play a role in many groups, but generally speaking, in terms of etiquette, those who upload frequently and efficiently to a group, tend to have their own requests filled more easily and vice versa.
Usenet FAQs play a key role in keeping order, based solely on the likelihood that if one doesn't follow the rules, any request for pirated artifacts by an aberrant individual might not be filled. More severe punishments may arrive in the form of "flaming" or online insulting or barb tossing of the uninformed user. However, no one can be "booted" out of a newsgroup, because it is more representative of public space than an IRC channel which is run and operated by individuals and/or their designated bots.
Newsgroups tend to be the first real publicly accessible conduit in the chain of piracy distribution. In contrast to access being limited to those operating in the upper echelon of the chain of piracy — courier groups, the FTP sites for exchanging files, and specific IRC channels — newsgroups are available to anyone who has access to a news server, and this is typically granted by one's ISP. Newsgroups are highly dependant on individuals who have upper echelon access to upload their material to the appropriate group. However, because newsgroups are publicly accessible, their position in the middle echelon of the hierarchy allows newsgroup warez to come from anyone, e.g., those who might have acquired pirated warez from file–sharing, Web sites, IRC or through repacking of digital images of their own copy of a game or software along with the appropriate crack.
IRC [36], a tool which envelops a number of piracy activities, operates as a communicative membrane that facilitates not only the organization of upper echelon pirates, but the location of particular files as well. Through IRC, individuals join specific servers hosting chat channels, and chat with others with similar interests on various channels (e.g., chatting about xbox games in an xbox channel). Cooper and Harrison (2001) elaborate on the social organization of audio piracy, and explain the tools and channels used. IRC is one of the oldest and most established communicatiion protocols aside from Usenet. mIRC and Trillian, which are both freely available for downloading on the