Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

creative work—source code—and a democratic ideal—free speech, there is no necessary or fundamental connection between them (Ratto 2005). Many academics and programmers have argued convincingly that the act of programming should be thought of as literary—“a culture of innovative and revisionary close reading” (Black 2002, 23; see also Chopra and Dexter 2007). As with print culture of the last two hundred years (Johns 1998), this literary culture of programming has often been dictated and delineated by a copyright regime whose logic is one of restriction. New free speech sensibilities, which fundamentally challenge the coupling between copyright and literary creation, must therefore be seen as a political act and choice, requiring sustained labor and creativity to stabilize these connections.
    Hackers have been in part successful in this political fight because of their facility with the law; because of years of intensive technical training, they have not only easily adopted the law but also tinkered with it to suit their needs. This active and transformative engagement with the law raises a set of pressing questions about the current state of global politics and legal advocacy. As Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2003, 457) note, the modern nation-state is one “rooted in a culture of legality”—a culture that in recentyears has become ever more pervasive, especially in the transnational arena. Whether it is the constitutional recognition of multiculturalism across Latin America and parts of Africa, or new avenues of commoditization like the patenting of seeds, these new political and economic relationships are “heavily inscribed in the language of the law” (ibid.). Given the extent to which esoteric legal codes dominate so many fields of endeavor, from pharmaceutical production to financial regulation to environmental advocacy, we must ask to what extent informal legal expertise, of the sort exhibited by F/OSS developers, is a necessary or useful skill for social actors seeking to contest such regimes, and where and how advocates acquire legal literacy. Legal pedagogy keeps the issues of freedom present, sometimes through the minuscule redefinitions that occur through discussion, legal exegesis, and the production of legal artifacts such as legal tests and guidelines. We must remain alert to these amateur forms of legalism and the alternative social forms that they imply.

CONCLUSION
    The Cultural Critique of Intellectual Property Law

    The door that is at least half-open, when it appears to open onto pleasant objects, is marked hope.
    —Ernst Bloch,
The Principle of Hope
    T his book concludes by examining one of the most significant, although unintended, political consequences of F/OSS technical production: the way it worked to fundamentally refigure the politics of intellectual property law. Using this material, I will revisit various themes raised throughout previous chapters and draw some preliminary conclusions about the importance of what I designate here as a material politics of cultural action.
    A paradox is at work here: How can a movement narrowly configured around a technical craft to ensure software freedom help catalyze broader political and economic transformations? Although F/OSS is foremost a technical movement based on the principles of free speech, its historical role in transforming other arenas of life is not primarily rooted in the power of language or the discursive articulation of a broad political vision. Instead, it effectively works as a politics of critique by providing a living counterexample, or in the words of free software’s most famous legal counsel, Eben Moglen: “Practical revolution is based upon two things: proof of concept and running code.” 1 Returning to the terminology offered by Bruno Latour (1993, 87), F/OSS production acts as a “theater of proof” that economic incentives are unnecessary to secure creative output—a message that attained visibility as various groups were inspired to follow in the footsteps of free software, and extend the legal logic of free software into other domains of artistic, academic, journalistic, and economic production. Equally crucial was that free software production was never easily shackled to a Right versus Left political divide, despite numerous attempts early in its history by its critics to portray it as communist. In an era when identification with Rightor Left, conservative or liberal, often functions as a