Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

fact that hobbyists had freely distributed copies of their BASIC interpreter at one of the Homebrew meetings, they were infuriated. In 1976, just as companies first consistently began to assert copyrights over software, Gates wrote a letter to the Homebrew hobbyists chastising them for, as he saw it, stealing his software. As Gates (1976; emphasis added) maintained:
    To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market? [ … ]The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
    Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
    Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tapeand the overhead make it a break-even operation.
One thing you do is prevent good software from being written
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    Although at the time Gates and Allen could not have foreseen just how important copyrights and patents would become to secure their company’s financial success, they were already justifying their position with one of the most common utilitarian rationales for intellectual property law. For “good software” to be written, they insisted, authors must be given a financial incentive in the form of copyrights, and therefore be given tight control over the reproduction of software.
    What started as a vibrant though niche hobbyist phenomenon had by 1977 turned into a “gold rush” personal computer business craze (Campbell-Kelly 2003). As Gates built the most profitable software firm in the world, securing profits through the deft application of intellectual property law and other business tactics, he would not have to worry much about “obsessive” hobbyists for another twenty-two years. At the time, the threat from these amateurs quickly receded as a handful of the Silicon Valley Homebrew hobbyists became capital-seeking business entrepreneurs, starting a few of the nearly two dozen small desktop-computing companies.
    As the US software, personal computing, and telecommunications industries came to dominate national as well as international markets in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan surpassed the United States in the global automobile and steel markets, and did so in the context of a US economy suffering from high trade deficits and the outsourcing of manufacturing. Amid fears of losing ground to foreigners in a flagging economy, US legislators launched an aggressive campaign to develop and fund the high-tech and knowledge economic sector (Dickson 1988; Mowery 1999; Sell 2003). In addition, under US president Ronald Reagan, the glimmerings of what is now known as neoliberalism—an ideology of enlightened selfishness marshaled by a government catering to big business in the name of laissez-faire economics—flickered brightly within the US political and economic landscape.
    In this climate, legislators encountered little friction, much less outright opposition, when proposing changes in intellectual property law and other corporate-friendly policies. These initiatives included new laws that facilitated collaborations between private industry and educational institutions (most famously through the Bayh-Dole Act), encouraged the industrial support of scientific research, and preserved defense funding for applied science and technology (Boyle 1996; Dickson 1988; Jaffe 1999).
    Changes in intellectual property law boosted the nascent software industry into a state of high profitability. Given the ease and extremely low cost of software replication, changes in intellectual property law proved crucial to protect source code, the “crown jewels” of the software industry. 4 In 1974, the Commission on New Technological Uses of CopyrightedWorks (CONTU) deemed “computer