I find it very interesting to follow Armin Medosch’s way of personally historicizing these first years of the current century. He presents 2001, the year when he curated the Kingdom of Piracy exhibition, as a starting point for his engagement. As it happens it was the same year when I myself started to actively follow and write about the fights around piracy, in its online and offline varieties.
Then he presents the year 2003 as a turning point. That’s how I remember it as well: that year, we were a loose group in Sweden who initiated Piratbyrån (the Bureau of Piracy).
For Armin Medosch, on the other hand, ‘the time for piracy was over’. Instead of the ‘provocations’ inherent in the very use of the word piracy, Armin Medosch went on to affirm the existence of a separate sphere of ‘legitimately free things’. First free software; secondly free culture, a phrase which at that time got almost synonymous with the still quite young hype around Creative Commons licensing; if you added free spectrum you had a holy trinity. (Shit, now I suddenly realize: Stallman the father, Lessig the son, and the wireless spirit of 2.4 GHz...)
We never took part in this hype of a ‘legitimately free’ sphere. I don’t think anyone in Piratbyrån ever read a book by Lawrence Lessig, even if he was sympathetically mentioned in a few of the earliest texts published on our website, which were written by the Italians of Wu Ming Foundation. And while we of course saw free software as something essential and its spread as positive, the FSF crowd still tended to be sceptical if not hostile towards us when we frankly declared ourselves to be non-believers in copyright.
A decisive moment for me personally occured in Berlin early summer 2004, as I visited the Wizards of OS conference which really dedicated itself to this trinity of free things. Coming from Sweden – a country which never really had had any ‘avant-garde of net culture in the 1990s’ – this must have been the first event in my life where this mixture of hackers, artists and academics met in a sometimes intelligent exchange of ideas. This became very stimulating for me exactly because I could not agree with some of the fundamental assumptions behind the two main reform proposals brought forward at that event. One was Creative Commons, which Sebastian Lütgert in one panel aptly characterized as a ‘social democracy for the digital commons’. The other was the proposal of a so-called ‘content flatrate,’ promising legalized file-sharing while somehow giving “compensation” to all kinds of copyright holders whose material was shared. I borrowed Sebastian’s phrase for a criticism of the latter proposal, the first thing about this topics which I ever wrote in English, mailed it out on Nettime and found out that it became quite discussed and republished a number of times. I remember this as my entry into the international, or really mainly continental-European, critical discourse about copyright.
Piratbyrån became an interface between this discourse and the broader Swedish so-called ‘file-sharing debate,’ which really broke into the mainstream in the spring of 2005. (The stimuli were two: A very controversial anti-piracy raid against an ISP, and the implementation of sharpened copyright laws.) The following year this debate reached new levels of intensity after the raid against The Pirate Bay. At that time, Piratbyrån were no longer alone in pursuing copyright criticism in Sweden, at the contrary there had formed loose networks of bloggers and also politicians (from left and right alike) who strongly opposed the war against piracy.
Of course, after every escalation some new actors joined the debate by proposing the “compromise” of a flat rate compensation models. But every time, these proposals have practically soon been drawn back after being heavily criticised. And I think that Piratbyrån’s long-standing criticism of this compensation discourse has really had an impact on the Swedish situation. Imaginary solutions have simply been kept out of sight, while we have kept insisting – however hard that is – that there can never be one solution for all the problems affecting cultural production in the age of digital reproduction.
For every “event” – like a raid ordered by anti-piracy groups, or the proposal of even harder copyright laws – the public and political interest in these questions have been widened in Sweden. And every time it felt like the discussion had to start from zero again. The mass-medial discourse reproduced the conflict as “shall there be file-sharing or not,” as if file-sharing was something to maybe implement in the future and not an existing reality. This frustrated us, especially as we were perfectly aware that it somehow was Piratbyrån who once had started this whole debate some years ago. We decided to perform a symbolic action on Walpurgis Night in the spring of 2007, went up at a mountain and burned our own Copy Me book, a collection of texts from our website published in 2005. We declared the file-sharing debate to be over, that ‘the files have already been downloaded,’ and that ‘we are not about anti-copyright’. The declaration ends, with a reference to a traditional Swedish Walpurgis song:
When we talk about file-sharing from now on it’s as one of many ways to copy. We talk about better and worse ways of indexing, archiving and copying – not whether copying is right or wrong. Winter is pouring down the hillside. Make way for spring!
Going back to Armin Medosch’s text, I can see a similarity to the break with piracy that he felt to participate in back in 2003: ‘...the notion that there was no more need for fighting against somebody, but being able instead to create our own worlds’. However, while the ‘free culture’ movement of that time wanted to build ‘beautiful islands of free software [and] free media’, our 2007 performance implied another kind of perspective shift. If anything is an island, it is the religion of copyright and its weirdly restrictive notion of “culture,” seeing it as nothing more than copyrightable “things”. Outside of this boring island there are vast seas and playgrounds. Let’s go there instead and do something fun.
Well, there is more to be said about this text. Two things I would like to elaborate is the question of technological determinism (or ‘McLuhanisms’ as Medosch writes) and the common figure of finding a middle way between two imagined extremes which I find extremely problematic or sometimes directly dangerous.