Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

and pleasure, in which the daily rhythms and trouble of life can be set aside. Yet these events work against entropy, sustaining unity while also engendering new possibilities.
    Sometimes, as one sits at their computer, coding feverishly for a project, thousands of miles away from some of their closest friends and interlocutors, one has to wonder, “Does this matter to others in the same way as it does to me? In what ways does this matter?” And more than any other event, the hacker conference answers such questions with lucidity and clarity. During the con, hackers see themselves. They are collectively performing a world that is an outgrowth of their practices, quotidian daily life, and deepest passions. The con powerfully states that this world, which is usually felt in unremarkable terms, is as important to others as it is to each hacker—a clear affirmation of the intersubjective basis by which we can conceptually posit any sort of lifeworld.

CHAPTER 2
    A Tale of Two Legal Regimes

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; [ … ] it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
    —Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
    I n 1981, journalist Tracy Kidder published
The Soul of a New Machine
, which earned a Pulitzer Prize for its incisive commentary on the heightened commercial turn in computing during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book ends pessimistically with a programmer lamenting how managers at large computer firms robbed the “soul” of computing away from their makers: “It was a different game now. Clearly, the machine no longer belonged to its makers” (Kidder 1981, 291).
    In 1984, a few years after the
Soul of a New Machine
hit bookstores, Stallman also spoke of the soulless state of computing when he lamented the tragic end to hacking in starkly cultural terms: “I am the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel like I ought to be dead,” Stallman said (quoted in Levy 1984, 427). Just when a handful of scholars and journalists first began to document the cultural mores of this subculture (Kidder 1981; Levy 1984; Turkle 1984; Weizenbaum 1976), Stallman declared its death, blaming it on the cloistering of source code.
    While Stallman and others may have accurately described some of the economic and legal conditions transforming programming and hacking in the 1980s, hacking never actually died. Contrary to Stallman’s predictions, but in part because of his actions, hacking did not simply survive; it flourished, experiencing what we might even portray as a cultural renaissance whose defining feature is the control over the hackers’ means of production: software and source code. Between Stallman’s dramatic declaration of thedeath of hacking and its current worldwide vibrancy thus lies a palpable irony about the unexpected outcomes that mark social life, political action, and broader historical transformations.
    The fact that these dire speculations and predictions turned out to be spectacularly false is more remarkable given what has transpired in the realm of intellectual property law in the last thirty years. Free software hackers and enthusiasts have successfully secured a domain of legal autonomy for software production during an era of such unprecedented transformations in intellectual property law that critics have described it in ominous terms like “information feudalism” (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002). Never before has a single legal regime of copyrights and patents reigned supreme across the globe, and yet never before in the short history of intellectual property law have we been graced with such powerful alternatives and possibilities, best represented by free software and the host of projects that have followed directly in its wake.
    This chapter, foremost meant to familiarize readers with the historical rise of free software, will present the constitution of two competing legal regimes, conceptualized here as two distinct trajectories that once existed independently but have come into direct conflict, especially over the last decade. The first trajectory pertains to free software’s maturity into a global technolegal movement. The second trajectory covers the globalization of intellectual property provisions so famously critiqued in the works of numerous scholars