Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

software, there is no sign that the copyright industries have curtailed their demands for additional restrictions. Yet as the domain of free software has grown and matured, it has without doubt shifted the axis of intellectual property law, providing a model that has inspired others to build similar endeavors in various fields stretching from journalism to science. Thus, one of the most profound political effects of free software has been to weaken the hegemonic status of intellectual property law; copyright and patents now have company.
    Nevertheless, the existence of free software (and the related though distinct digital practices, such as crowdsourcing) should not be mobilized to make overblown assessments of the role of digital media formations in changing the more general political makeup of society. No simple connection between democracy and social media can be sustained (Ginsburg 2008; Hindman 2008; Lovink 2007; Morozov 2011; Rossiter 2007), nor is that what I am advancing here. 3 Instead, we should recognize the viable alternatives in a moment when intellectual property law is itself undergoing rapid transformation. When it comes to the politics of access, these are the best
and
worst of times. Examining existing political possibilities, such as free software, flags the insight of Antonio Gramsci (1971, 175) about the nature of radical critique: at its most powerful, it should be “armed with pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” One way to light the “spark of hope in the past,” in the memorable words of Walter Benjamin (1969, 255), is to bring into plain view the forms of conflict, alternatives, and struggles not only of our past but also those in our midst. Now let us see how free software came to provide an alternative to copyrights and patents.
    1970–1984: The Commodification of Software
    During the 1960s, and for some of the 1970s, most computer firms sold hardware with software accompanying it, while legislators and courts had yet to grant either patent or copyright protection for software. Prior to the personal computer’s development, a few firms started to sell stand-alone software products, such as Informatics’ Mark IV, a pricey (thirty thousand dollars) but popular file management system that enabled businesses to computerize their operations (Campbell-Kelly 2003). In 1969, the nascent software industry received an inadvertent boost when the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) started to sell some software independently of its hardware—a strategic move to avert an impending government antitrust suit over bundling (Swedin and Ferro 2005).
    Given the lack of legal restrictions on software, hackers and programmers in various university labs routinely read and modified the computer source code of software produced by others. Prior to the 1970s, most hackers and programmers accessed computers—usually large mainframes—withinuniversities, businesses, or the military, but this predicament would change soon after an enthusiastic community of computer hobbyists mushroomed. Throughout most of the 1970s, computers were a far cry from being mass-produced or accessible, yet hobbyists, many of them clustered in high-tech areas, followed the latest developments in computing and electronic technologies by regularly meeting in person at gatherings (Akera 2001; Ceruzzi 1998; Freiberger and Swaine 2000). The hobbyists of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club, in particular, played an important role in popularizing what was the first commercially available home computer in the United States, the Altair (Friedman 2005). A kit composed of a “big, empty box with a CPU card and 256 bytes of memory” (Freiberger and Swaine 2000, 52), the Altair was manufactured by MITS, a two-person Albuquerque-based company, which sold the bare-bones kit as a mail-order product. Though the Altair lacked what we now see as the indispensable components of a personal computer, notably the keyboard and video terminal, the hundreds of Homebrew hobbyists first using it were thrilled that
anything
of this technological sophistication was commercially available for individual, personal use.
    Also originally lacking any software, the Altair eventually included new features, added by MITS, such as an interpreter of the BASIC computer language written by two young programmers, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who dropped out of college to found “Micro-Soft” [
sic
]. When the pair got wind of the