Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

on the hacker technical tactic of clever reuse to imaginatively hack the law by creating the GNU GPL, a near inversion of copyrightlaw. The GPL is a license that while built on top of copyright law, reverses traditional copyright principles. 11 Instead of granting the owner the right to restrict copies, the owner of a copyright grants the
users
the right to copy and share programs. And the GPL goes further, projecting into future versions: it behaves like a legal firewall against the threat of future private enclosure. Future versions of a distributed software program licensed under the GNU GPL must remain under the same license, and hence can also be used, shared, modified, and distributed by other users. (This differs from putting software in the public domain, since material released this way can be subsequently incorporated into a new piece of work, which in turn can be copyrighted).
    By grafting his license on top of an already-existing system, Stallman dramatically increased the chances that the GPL would be legally binding. It is an instance of an ironic response to a system of powerful constraint, and one directed with unmistakable (and creative) intention—and whose irony is emphasized by its common descriptor, copyleft, signaling its relationship to the very artifact, copyright, that it seeks to displace.
    While Stallman felt that open access to knowledge would lead to more efficiency in programming, his primary goal was freedom: he wanted to engineer a legal structure to secure freedom, as he explained to Glyn Moody (2001, 28), one of the early chroniclers of the free software movement:
    The overall purpose [of the GPL] is to give the users freedom by giving them free software they can use and to extend the boundaries of what you can do with entirely free software as far as possible. Because the idea of GNU is to make possible for people to do things with their computers without accepting [the] domination of someone else. Without letting some owners of software say, “I won’t let you understand how this works; I’m going to keep you helplessly dependent on me and if you share with your friends, I will call you a pirate and put you in jail.”
    The creation of the FSF and especially the copyleft were intentional acts of political resistance to halt the increasing proprietization of information. Yet Stallman did not launch a radical politics against capitalism or frame his vision in terms of social justice. Rather, he circumscribed his political aims, limiting them to securing a space for the technocultural values of his passion and lifeworld—computer hacking.
    Many hackers and developers learned about the ethical and legal message of free software early in its history, via the GPL or “GNU Manifesto,” both of which circulated on Usenet message boards and often accompanied pieces of free software. At the same time, many first-generation hackers who used free software were frequently unaware, unmoved, or even downright repelled by the ethical arguments presented by Stallman and his dramatic manifesto. During interviews, for example, many spoke of their negative or puzzled reaction to Stallman’s “quacky” and “strange” ideas. One developer explained his ambivalent posture by saying, “I was alittle confused. To me it [“The GNU Manifesto”] sounded socialistic and ideological, a bit like [the] Jehovah’s Witness, something which will never come to pass. At the time I disregarded it as a mad man’s dream. But I did continue to use Emacs and GCC.”
    Indeed, many of the early adopters were attracted to free software simply because the applications were cheap and robust. Even better, the license agreement granted permission to read the source code and modify it. The majority of the hackers I interviewed, in other words, came to free software at first merely for the sake of affordable, better-built technology and had little knowledge about the existence, much less the workings, of intellectual property law.
    The year that Stallman resigned from MIT to write free software in his battle to secure software freedom, 1984, proved to be a milestone for the globalization of intellectual property laws as well. This was also the year when various industries formed a slew of new trade associations, notably the Intellectual Property Committee, International Intellectual Property Alliance, and Software Publishers Association, which sought to tighten intellectual property laws domestically and export