Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Titel: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: E. Gabriella Coleman

Vom Netzwerk:

your own risk [ … ]
     that doesn’t allow redistribution, does it
     vilinger: that’s a really crappy copyright statement.
     vilinger: it can mean almost anything [ … ]
     vilinger: doesn’t allow anything. effectively no license
     another license written by an idiot who didn’t comprehend what copyright is
     (it’s a reasonably accurate description of the default, unlicensed state of a work)
     My next copyright is going to just contain “Ask muffield”
    Over ten years of active development and use of free software, a critical mass of hackers had inculcated not simply a commitment to their craft but also a well-developed ethos for information freedom and sharing that ran aground against developments in intellectual property law.
    Although much of the work of so-called intellectual property harmonization has been completed, it is too early to declare it a thing of the past, a completed history; its future is still open. In fact, despite the fact that harmonization is so often used to describe the creation of a single global standard of intellectual property law, the marked conflict over intellectual property law that resulted is far from harmonious. To take one prominent illustration, in 2005 the European Parliament overwhelmingly rejected a proposed software patent directive that was under consideration for a number of years. This decision came after pressure from a grassroots movement that engaged in years of demonstrations, many of them organized and attended by F/OSS developers (Karanovic 2010). The directive sought to establish and fully harmonize the criteria for software patentability, since each national patent office still follows a slightly different set of principles. The European Commission over the last few years has aggressively tried to pass patent measures that outline principles for adoption throughout the European Union—criteria that, like the US system, overwhelmingly favor private enclosure over public access.
    Not surprisingly, the intellectual property associations, once oblivious to the legal alternatives provided by free software, are now not only aware of open source but also actively attempting to halt the spread of this rival legal regime. The International Intellectual Property Alliance, for instance, issued the Special 301 Report about Brazil (recommending that Brazil remain on the watch list due to numerous violations), and included the followingsuggestions about open source: “Avoid legislation on the mandatory use of open source software by government agencies and government controlled companies,” as though open source itself were an example of piracy. 25 If free software developers are actively fighting the harmonization of intellectual property law, the intellectual property associations are actively fighting not only copyright infringement but more remarkable, the global spread of open-source software too.
    Conclusion
    In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a tidal wave of commercialization transformed software from a technical object into a commodity, to be bought and sold in the open market under the alleged protection of intellectual property law. At least for a period of time, the soul of the machine seemed to retreat from public view, leaving certain people, like Stallman, deeply perturbed by these trends. And it was in part because of the political actions that Stallman took—notably by chartering the FSF, writing free software, and most crucially, coming up with a legal hack to protect it—that hacking as a craft based on the open exchange of knowledge continued to exist, although it would be radically transformed.
    Nevertheless, and this is key to emphasize, while Stallman’s political actions were pivotal, they were not enough. In the ensuing years, his actions even sat in tension with the apolitical pursuit of hacking that also contributed to the vibrant explosion of free software. Even though Stallman injected an important spirit of resistance and a legal basis by which to practically secure a zone of partial autonomy, when free software enlarged into a global movement, conscious resistance or political intention figured less prominently. During the subsequent years (1991–98), free software grew into a much larger technical and social movement in which geeks all over the world participated in the day-to-day development of free software while learning a new vocabulary by which to comprehend its