I’ve been listening in on The Pirate Bay trial almost every day for the past two weeks.  Through it I have gotten a renewed and impassioned sympathy for the pirate movement.  Actually, we can call it Free Culture if you prefer.  The prosecuting side has attacked the tongue-in-cheek P-word time and time again: “Their intentions are clear, just listen to the name!”.

Well, as with the free software / open source movement, pirates in this sense is not about free in the monetary sense.  It’s about freedom and access.  It’s about being able to share.  And not least it’s about being able to take advantage of this incredible technology we have for creating.  That’s ultimately my fear and what fuels my passion for this issue, that we will be locked in, scared of breaking the rules and as such not being able to grab the fantastic opportunities for cultural development that is already out there and will only become bigger as we figure out how to use the internet in more adventurous ways and as technology develops to make all this possible.

Throughout the trial I have this gorgeously melancholic passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas spinning in my head:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

It might seem pompous to quote Thompson writing about the monumental counter culture movement in the 60s and 70s, but I’m constantly hoping that that’s not how it’ll turn out, that this wave of freedoms that we seem within grasping reach of (if we don’t already have them, I guess that’s what the courts will decide) will slip out of our hands and the future will be one where private companies at will can make a living by threatening citizens instead of one where we’re all free to share, create, copy, improve, imitate and consume.

I got a story from a good friend of mine about the “old world” last night.  It was a world in which a borrowed paper copy from a photocopier in the library had to be handed back for destruction.  Could my friend have copied the copies in between?  Absolutely.  A nonsensical act that all too sadly reminds a lot about the current furious fight in court presenting  supposed evidence of a 1 to 1 relationships between a download and a lost sale.

Of course there needs to exist systems so that people who wish to charge for their creation can offer people a way to do so, but the fact is that the old order is breaking down. Artists who were formerly on the prosecution’s side have jumped ship.  We’re not dealing with paper copies and trucks to move them anymore.  We’re dealing with electrons in copper and light in fiber.  I think we’re moving past the middle man role of the record companies and distribution companies in a sense, or at least changing their role drastically.  We’re moving past the point where it’s possible (never mind desirable!) to reign in these bits and bytes.  In some areas we’re moving past the possibilities for market segmentation, for complete control over your product.  Follow the doctrine and ye shall succeed.

So to answer my headline: overture, no doubt.  Preferably something with cannons.

Maintain hardline kopimi. Overture or elegy?