[-empyre-] laws, outlaws & golden pirates

[Paolo Cirio]

Dear Shu Lea,

and Simon, thanks for the introduction.

last day i was just reading this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/03/us-anti-piracy-extradition-prosecution

it's funny how jurisdiction works today. i wish i could study law, but somehow pirates come first, ending up to shape legislations. isn't just general political evolution?

but so now where are the international waters? multinational firms circumnavigate local legislations all the time to avoid national IP/privacy/tax policies. how should regular people and horny pirates like us navigate through those archipelagos of laws and feudal guards of immaterial treasures?

by chatting with savvy IP lawyers, i often realized how many contradictions there are between local legislations and present international IP commodity trading, which became a permanent hypocrisy based on the "double standard" of piracy activities. nowadays, who can afford political lobbing and lawsuits is definitely the king of piracy.

in the meanwhile, heroic parasites and general "consumers" are not allowed to reclaim back their belongings, which used to be human rights rather than trading commodities and overpriced products.

i live in UK and i still feel lucky. in Italy from where i come from, PirateBay website is censored since a year, and in these days, a new copyright law is coming up and it may censor most of the citizen journalists (agcom law), even though is not really democratic. you mentioned France. i heard that recently in Germany using P2P software became very risky due to outsourced legal threats, which actually are not properly legal in front of the national Constitution as the Italian instance. isn't a civil right the "fair use" of knowledge and sharing of cultural material? civil rights should be rediscovered maybe through law.

hence, can we be advocate for legacy, rather than pirates? should we be the anonymous vandals or proud to face the empire in public with a clear political agendas? i'm not talking about practices, but branding strategies. just provoking. although, recently, i prefer the character of Peter Pam against the pirate Captain Hook in Never Land.

well, i know, we are just artists. playing with language and controversy, just pushing the borders and experimenting with them.

i think with the last two projects of mine i succeed to point out some il/legal ambiguities, by using the same strategies and tactics of the kings of the empire. 
i would say that i pirated the pirates, through their same means.

with Face to Facebook (2011 with A. Ludovico). i still have 1 million pictures of 1M persons from 50 different countries downloaded from Facebook, however i bet to discuss the copyright of those images. well Facebook didn't wait long to send us letters from its lawyer, but they didn't manage to have a look at my server that is based just a few miles away from them (all the data is hosted in a server in California). as some of our Electronic Frontier Foundation's advisers inferred, for Facebook it could be too politically embarrassing to reclaim the full ownership of those images. well Facebook is so aggressive, and they even threaten us for trademark infringement for using the word facebook in our project. they just did it through a bot that scans all the web domains and looks for the words "face" and "book", then, always automatically, it sends an email of legal warning. consequentially if you don't know your rights and haven't got a good lawyer you may loose your domain. they just do it by misuse of power.

by the project P2P Gift Credit Card, beside the critical financial issues and the economic model proposed, i exploited VISA credit cards through issuing a "special version" of them. as a magazine noted: "the most interesting and humorous element of this work is the detail of the small print on the cards and website, not accepting responsibility or liability for the card’s use or malfunction, much as such legal terminology is applied to real businesses". by the same way credit cards hide extra fees and usury, i could turn them in something potentially convenient for reestablishing economic justice.
by the way, today the pirates of the financial industry are definitely the worst, i wouldn't go beyond the topic of this list, but they are robbing the republic from our wealth. the next sea  should be where the data treasure of the offshore capitals are hidden in deep Black Pools.


back to you with this question: shall we still call us pirates? how can we solve the semiological, political, esthetic and branding struggle around the terminology of the pirates. isn't often misinterpreted or even recently alienated by trendy fashion? can the Pirate Party win elections in the long terms?

where does the desire stay today? on what should we work on, what people needs?
P2P sounds to me a better idea to work on broadly, proposing something desirable by anyone like change, sharing, friendship, trust and abundance, against the pirates of our wealth.
we may loose glamour, but we may get efficacy.
 
your Peter Pan.


On 5 Jul 2011, at 20:24, shu lea cheang wrote:

> simon asks me about République Pirate, aya, another not realized proposal.
> i think i must be better writing proposals then engaged in crossfire talks.
> 
> so, a bit of history recap.
> in 2002, when we started Kingdom of Piracy, we have a long debate
> with armin, yukiko and richard (barbrook) between claiming ourselves
> kingdom or republic. This République Pirate was written in 2010, as situated
> in France.
> 
> Here I try to reconsider your proposal about pirate art/cultural production.
> Ultimately i think we have a turn around, reversal of fortune, so to say??
> the government is now the pirates, the empire is back? The IP market
> is but a seemingly ligitimate front???
> 
> over
> sl
> 
> 
> République Pirate
> a proposal by Shu Lea Cheang for poptronics.fr, 2010
> 
> The newly established HADOPI legislation calls for the creation of a government agency that manages  "graduated response" (or so called 3 strikes) process on internet's illegal downloaders. First they are sent a warning e-mail, then a letter if continue, and finally must appear before a judge if they offend again. The judge can then impose a fine, or suspend their access to the internet. The Hadopi law is highly debated and generated a lot of resistance among French/global net-users. There is also possible adoption of the Hadopi law among EU countries in the following years.
> République Pirate as an art project, proposes a 'confession' scenario for Illegal downloaders. We ask the net  users to sign on as the République Pirate citizens by submitting her/his recent 3 allegedly illegal downloads. Either music, sound, cinema, texts, game or software, the downloads are submitted with the sites' URLs. The citizen when admitted to the République Pirate can choose to use pseudo names. Their identities protected. A new ID passport is to be issued by the République Pirate which grants its citizen the rights to upload/download and share pirate commons on the net.  République Pirate is a net refuge for the net commons generation. Beyond an art project, a team of legal consultants are recruited to defend its citizens if they should be caught by HADOPI law enforcement.
> 
> République Pirate extends beyond French borders. By admitting citizens of illegal net behaviors, République Pirate builds a net nation where data of  current net resources and file exchange are listed. With République Pirate project, we counter HADOPI's net policing force. By enlisting millions of République Pirate's citizens, we claim République France has been taken over by
> the pirates!!!!   Long live the République Pirate.
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

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