Coming across this recent article brought a lot of other shit to mind.  I’ll start with the catalyst, then dig into the background:

http://guerillartivism.net/node/97

“NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead.”

“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.” Cotton’s comments come in Paul Stweeting’s report on Hollywood’s latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.”

So, what are these losses again, mhh? Lets pretend we should have a exponential growth, then pay many people to wrap this desire into sufficient logic to make it appear as somewhat rooted in some facts. Then cleverly whine about reality not matching your desires *hum*, your dues and call it losses to justify harsher laws to enforce the subsistence of your mis adapted business. Bonus points for having the guts to compare this hallucination to real currency manipulation. Not that currency is really less of an hallucination, but still we somewhat agree to believe in it.

It’s a good point, despite the Hysteria.  The IRA pulled off a historically massive bank robbery—$26 milllion pounds cash—but a heavy-duty Bittorrent server does that in a few weeks, in terms of trafficing stolen goods.  This is a point that a lot of people are aware of, but not a lot of them are in any rush to point it out—except hired prostitutes like “Rick Cotton”, which is a porno name if I ever heard one.

The articles this brought to mind are a Wired peice—“The Shadow Internet”—and a very eye-opening essay by Kevin Flaherty from Cryptogon, which is the best politics site on the internet right now, for my money.  The essay in question is called “Militant Electronic Piracy: Non-Violent Insurgency Tactics Against the American Corporate State” but let’s start with the Wired article.

Source Link:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html

It’s a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It’s an appealing, democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music they buy and post them online. But that’s not quite how it works.

In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don’t share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single “Adam and Eve” file. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a chance to buy it.

The whole shebang - the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P networks girding it all together - is not about trading or sharing at all. It’s a broadcast system. It takes a signal, the new U2 single, say, and broadcasts it around the world. The pirate pyramid is a perfect amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at every descending level, until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which time it can be received by anyone capable of typing “U2” into a search engine.

Kevin took this concept to it’s logical conclusion in his essay:
http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html

This analysis will use the term “militant electronic piracy” to refer to the high level, massive theft and distribution of copyrighted material for purposes of politico-economic warfare. This may be viewed in stark contrast to the more ubiquitous activity of “file trading,” where individuals use peer-to-peer software to download music, movies and software for free. Casual file traders ascribe no political motivation whatsoever to their actions. “The American Corporate State,” (ACS) refers to the existing power structure in the U.S. This system is characterized by the fascist convergence of corporate and government interests.

Any violent insurgency against the ACS is sure to fail and will only serve to enhance the state’s power. The major flaw of violent insurgencies, both cell based (Weathermen Underground, Black Panthers, Aryan Nations etc.) and leaderless (Earth Liberation Front, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, etc.) is that they are attempting to attack the system using the same tactics the ACS has already mastered: terror and psychological operations. The ACS attained primacy through the effective application of terror and psychological operations. Therefore, it has far more skill and experience in the use of these tactics than any upstart could ever hope to attain. This makes the ACS impervious to traditional insurgency tactics.

This is not a new observation, of course, but it’s one that needs to be repeated several thousand times a day, or at least until I stop getting emails asking me what kind of guns I recommend buying to Fight the Power, Dude.

What is new is Flaherty’s suggested and purely theoretical alternative which he is not advocating in any way, shape or form:

In the most simple terms, the less money individuals spend, the faster the collapse of the ACS will occur. The ubiquity of peer-to-peer file trading tools provides non-technical computer users point-and-click access to massive amounts of music, movies and software. The militant electronic pirates are intelligent. They know most people are lazy and will never---willingly---do anything to fight the status quo, in terms of tangible power.

Do casual downloaders think they are throwing Molotov cocktails at a TimeWarner building or blowing up a Walmart each time they download music or movies from the Internet for free? No, the average p2p user isn’t thinking along these lines. But every legitimate purchase that isn’t made as a result of electronic piracy drives another nail into the coffin of the American Corporate State. At what point does electronic piracy move from being an annoyance for profit hungry corporations to a national security matter?

- Militant Electronic Piracy Operations

Militant electronic piracy operations may be carried out by anti-corporate computer experts in any geographic location on the planet. Whereas armed insurgents face physical and public relations impossibilities of using political violence successfully, militant electronic pirates, on the other hand, can more effectively control the battle space using security hardened software tools (all of which are available for free). On the Internet, militant electronic pirates possess capabilities that are more congruent to the corporate state than the most sophisticated armed insurgency group could ever hope to attain in the conventional military sphere.

By using electronic piracy as a mode of attack, pirates are able to inflict tens of billions of dollars worth of damages per year against the ACS. This is an astonishing proof of the validity of this mode of attack versus violent operations. Violent insurgency groups, such as the Earth Liberation Front, have only managed to inflict tens of million dollars worth of damage to the ACS over their entire lifetimes.

As for Flaherty’s question—At what point does electronic piracy move from being an annoyance for profit hungry corporations to a national security matter?—my guess would be we’re going to see that happen this year.  In related news, the EU has recently admitted to spending billions a year on “propaganda”—and as the screws tighten this will surely include ads hyping piracy as terrorism (just like smoking weed, or asking questions).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/01/weu101.xml

Mr Rotherham also details extensive spending on umbrellas, mouse mats, pencils and other items branded with the EU logo - part of a £2.4 billion budget for European Commission “projects”. He also reveals big grants to think-tanks and EU-funded trips to the European Parliament.

Using accounts from across the EU’s five main institutions - the European Parliament, Council of Ministers, European Court of Justice, the EU Council and the European Court of Auditors - Mr Rotherham calculates that the total spent on “propaganda” last year across all member states was £3.8 billion out of an overall budget of about £84 billion. Britain contributes about £6.3 billion a year to the EU, more than any other member state.