Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

laws.” By its very definition, law is endowed with authority, as a force nonetheless sustained by the monopoly use of state-sanctioned violence.
    One might add that constitutional laws (like those of the First Amendment and intellectual property in the United States) are often revered and cherished, for being the foundational laws of nations, they carry with them the extra weight of widespread patriotic respect, and are commonly invoked during times of national crisis and rituals of commemoration. What is important to keep in mind is that Stallman, in the process of creating a legal alternative to a constitutional mandate, bypassed the usual channels (the courts and judges) by which one would question or change a law, especially constitutional law. In so doing, he also partially punctured the authority of the law, laying bare the assumption that only institutions of legal authority (the courts and congress) have the right to alter the law. To be sure, lawyers and legal council were and still are essential to making free software law legally binding. The point, however, I am trying to convey is that Stallman did bypass some traditional routes, such as lawsuits, in order to challenge patents and copyrights, instead devising a license that cleverly reformatted copyright by its very use.
    The GNU GPL and similar copyleft licenses hence rupture the naturalized form of intellectual property by inverting its ossified, singular logic through the very use of intellectual property. 18 Let’s recall how F/OSS licenses work: they simultaneously use
and
defy the core tenets of copyright law. To make software open source or free software, one first applies a copyright and then adds any one of a number of F/OSS licenses, which then disables the restrictive logic of copyright law. In this capacity, the use of these F/OSS legal artifacts behave as a “destructive analysis of the familiar” (Sapir 1921, 94), to use an old but famous anthropological phrase.
    This move is not unlike Marx’s inversion of Hegelian idealism, which retained Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectical method to repose history not as an expression of the “Absolute Idea” but instead as humanity’s collective creation through labor. Using copyright as its vehicle, the copyleft turns copyright on its head and in the process demystifies copyright’s “absolute” theory of economic incentive. In other words, free software practices denaturalize the assumption that intellectual property instruments hold a singular relationship between means and ends—a relationship that can only be established by institutions of authority, notably courts and governments.
    Without question, F/OSS hackers are prominent actors in a contemporary debate, yet one that speaks to a longer history of contention over thedefinitions of individualism, free speech, property, and freedom within liberal thought and practice. Probably more than any other current site of labor, F/OSS production makes legible the present-day frictions between free speech and intellectual property regulations that have grown so markedly pronounced, in part because both sets of rights have undergone such significant expansions over the last hundred years. If courts have altered the provisions of intellectual property law so as to sanction and facilitate the conversion of knowledge into private property, they have also altered the definition of free speech laws so as to accord new protections to categories of expression such as political speech and, in some instances, source code. Hackers have spoken clearly in this debate, but primarily in their capacity as producers of free and open software: they demonstrate in material action that they value the right to express themselves, learn, and create technology over the right to privatize the fruits of their labor—a site of labor that became particularly prominent as other groups and actors, from radical anticapitalists to capitalist giants, have deployed free software.
    Nested within this liberal conundrum is another closely related friction over the definition of liberal individualism: What does it mean to be a
free individual
? In the mid-nineteenth century, Mill helped to clearly define the debate when he reformulated the utilitarian philosophy of his upbringing that also dominated the political landscape of Britain by infusing the utilitarian concept of selfhood with overtones of Romanticism. Unwilling to reduce individuals to pleasure seekers of