Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

them internationally. Acting largely as an umbrella group for other similar organizations, the International Intellectual Property Alliance in particular would come to play an indispensable role as one of the most powerful copyright lobbyist organizations in the world. By the end of the 1980s, its membership included the following eight trade associations: the Association of American Publishers, American Film Marketing Association, Business Software Alliance (BSA), Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association, Information Technology Association of America, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), National Music Publishers Association, and Recording Industry Association of America.
    Throughout that year, these and other trade organizations lobbied on Capitol Hill for amendments to a key US trade treaty, the General System of Preferences. The treaty granted member countries the right to export certain commodities tariff free to the United States, and these trade organizations successfully pushed for General System of Preferences status to be contingent on recognition of US intellectual property law and protection of the goods covered under those laws. Concurrent with these changes, legislators amended Section 301 of the US Trade Act, giving the president the power to withdraw other trade benefits if the Office of the United States Trade Representative decided that a country was not providing “adequate and effective” protection for US intellectual property (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002, 89).
    1991–1998: Silent Revolutions
    If two opposing legal trends emerged between 1984 and 1991, then the years between 1991 and 1998 represent their global consolidation, whichoccurred largely beneath the radar of public awareness and scrutiny. The expanding use of desktop computers and networking at home, especially for business purposes, guaranteed steady profits for the software industry, and transformed small firms like Microsoft, Oracle, Novell, Cisco, and Adobe into some of the most influential as well as profitable corporations worldwide. In the early 1990s, even with healthy profits, a lucrative market, and well-established intellectual property regulations, the trade associations representing the software industry and other sectors of the knowledge economy were unsatisfied with the legal state of affairs. Trade groups intensified their efforts to secure more changes in intellectual property law largely through international treaties to better serve the interests of the corporations they represented.
    To achieve this, they integrated four new approaches into their arsenal: they worked with federal law enforcement agencies to strike against “pirates”; they pursued civil court remedies against copyright infringers; they launched moral education campaigns about the evils of piracy (Gillespie 2009); and finally, they pushed aggressively for the inclusion of intellectual property provisions in the multilateral trade treaties of the 1990s, notably the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
    In the United States, these tactics were assisted by new legislation signed into law by President George Bush in October of 1992 that redefined a class of copyright infringement cases in the United States as felonies. Before 1992, copyright infringers could face only civil suits and criminal misdemeanor charges, but after the changes made to Title 18 of the US Crimes and Criminal Procedure Code, a person who made more than ten copies of a software program could receive up to two years in jail and a $250,000 fine. 12 In making a class of copyright infringement a felony, policymakers and intellectual property association representatives could then argue for more inclusion of law enforcement agencies in the global fight against piracy.
    On the international front, in 1994, after years of intense US-led lobbying efforts, TRIPS became incorporated within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and in 1995, was passed off to GATT’s more robust replacement, the World Trade Organization. At the time, this treaty represented a sweeping global change to intellectual property law, as it required all member nations to eventually adopt a single legal standard deriving largely from US legal principles. Among other provisions, some of the most significant were the following: patents had to ultimately be open to all technological fields (including software), the copyright term was modeled on the US