CHAPTER 2

The Tao of Pirates

Sea Forts, Patent Trolls, and Why We Need Piracy

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The Principality of Sealand
© Bobleroi.co.uk

Drift a few miles east from Harwich, a town on the southeastern coast of England, into the murky salt waters of the English Channel, and you’ll see two hulking concrete towers jutting out of the briny deep. At the base of these columns, the wreckage of a sunken ship languishes on the seabed like some drowning Atlas supporting their weight. Eighty-five feet above, on the towers’ twin summits, rests a gigantic rusting platform lashed by decades of wind and rain. It was built during World War II, complete with living quarters that housed hundreds of British troops and an arsenal of antiaircraft guns that picked off the Luftwaffe descending on London. This embattled structure was known as Fort Roughs before it was decommissioned in 1946 and left to rot on the high seas by the British government. Nobody predicted the coming of Major Paddy Roy Bates.

Former army man Bates happened upon Fort Roughs when he was running Radio Essex, a pirate station broadcasting rock ’n’ roll to the United Kingdom from another one of four identical sea forts in the area. But the problem was that this particular fort stood less than three miles off the mainland, still within the United Kingdom’s jurisdiction. Her Majesty’s government was not amused. They ordered the station to close.

Bates realized that these rules didn’t apply farther out to sea, at Fort Roughs. In fact, he realized that no rules applied farther out to sea. On Christmas Eve 1966, Bates stormed the sea fort, evicted with brute force a pirate station already there, and seized control. But this time he was thinking bigger than just running a radio station. The self-appointed Prince Roy; his wife, Princess Joan; and their son, Prince Michael, declared their decaying bounty an independent sovereign nation in accordance with international law, and the Principality of Sealand was born.

Prince Roy set about transforming the crumbling fort into the world’s smallest state, hoisting a flag and adding a helipad. The British did nothing to prevent the population of Sealand (at the time, three, and since then, rarely north of five) from minting their own coins and stamps, issuing passports, and handing out regal titles. In fact, you can become a lord or a lady of Sealand via eBay for £18.95 plus postage.

“Sealand was founded on the principle that any group of people dissatisfied with the oppressive laws and restrictions of existing nation-states may declare independence in any place not claimed to be under the jurisdiction of another sovereign entity,” the Bates family proclaimed. And so began one of the most bizarre stories in British (or Sealandish) history.

Strange tales from Sealand regularly made headlines over the years. In 1968, shots were fired at a passing navy vessel (that may or may not have been trying to invade). Bates landed in court, but the English judge took the position that Sealand was indeed outside the United Kingdom’s territorial waters. In 1977 it was invaded by a posse of German and Danish conspirators, but the Bates family regained control and fended them off in a war the size of a large bar fight. Sealand has long attracted legions of shady characters looking to set up casinos, brothels, and other such illicit enterprises safe from national laws. Sealand passports (many of them forgeries) have turned up in the possession of unsavory characters around the world; one was found with the body of Gianni Versace’s assassin in Miami.

The micronation made international headlines in 2000 when a company called HavenCo struck a deal with the “royal family” to build a heavily armed offshore data sanctuary to house “sensitive” information anonymously, outside the reaches of governments, lawyers, ex-wives, and other prying eyes. Gambling sites, file-sharing networks—really, anyone trying to escape state surveillance or the tax man—were welcome. The only data HavenCo won’t house is anything to do with child porn, spamming, or terrorism.

Sealand wasn’t just the world’s first man-made sovereign state, but also the first global capital of Internet anarchy. The second-craziest Bates family in the world turned a pirate station into a renegade, pirate nation.

Sealand may be the first and only sovereign territory founded by a pirate DJ, but it’s far from being the only country built on pirate culture. In fact, pirates have been the architects of new societies for centuries: they have established new genres of film and music and created new types of media, often operating anonymously and always—initially, at least—outside the law. They overthrow governments, birth new industries, and win wars. Pirates create positive social and economic changes, and understanding piracy today is more important than ever, because now that we all can copy and broadcast whatever we want; we can all become pirates.

No sea fort required.

Copyrights and Wrongs

So who exactly is a pirate?

A. That guy who sells bootleg DVDs on the corner; B. Some dude with a beard and a parrot who might mug you if you go boating;

C. A guardian of free speech who promotes efficiency, innovation, and creativity, and who has been doing so for centuries.

The correct answer is all of the above. A pirate is essentially anyone who broadcasts or copies someone else’s creative property without paying for it or obtaining permission.

First things first: some acts of piracy are quite simply theft. Every year industry loses billions to piracy. Companies suffer, artists and creators lose earnings, and people lose their jobs.

But although intellectual property rights seem right and piracy clearly seems wrong, the opposite also can be true. One man’s copyright terrorist is another’s creative freedom fighter: many forms of piracy transform society for the better.

Another pirate nation that began in a fashion similar to Sealand is the United States of America. During the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, the Founding Fathers pursued a policy of counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents, and stealing intellectual property wholesale. “Lax enforcement of the intellectual property laws was the primary engine of the American economic miracle,” writes Doron S. Ben-Atar in Trade Secrets. “The United States employed pirated know-how to industrialize.” Americans were so well known as bootleggers, Europeans began referring to them with the Dutch word “Janke,” then slang for pirate, which is today pronounced “Yankee.”*

Trace the origins of recorded music, radio, film, cable TV, and almost any industry where intellectual property is involved, and you will invariably find pirates at its beginnings. When Edison invented the phonographic record, musicians branded him a pirate out to steal their work, until a system was created for paying them royalties. Edison, in turn, went on to invent filmmaking, and demanded a licensing fee from those making movies with his technology. This caused a band of filmmaking pirates, among them a man named William, to flee New York for the then still wild West, where they thrived, unlicensed, until Edison’s patents expired. These pirates continue to operate there, albeit legally now, in the town they founded: Hollywood. William’s last name? Fox.

When cable TV first came about, in 1948, the cable companies refused to pay the networks for broadcasting their content, and for more than thirty years operated like a primitive illegal file-sharing network, until Congress decided that they, too, should pay up, and a balance was struck between copyright holders and the pirate TV broadcasters.

If copyright laws had stopped these pirates in their tracks, today we might live in a world where America looked more like a giant Amish farm. We would have no recorded music, no cable TV, and a selection of films on a par with an economy airline seat. The pirates were on the wrong side of the law, but as Lawrence Lessig expounds upon in his book Free Culture, in hindsight it’s clear their acts were important. By refusing to conform to regulations they deemed unfair, pirates have created industries from nothing. Because traditionally society has cut these pirates some slack and accepted that they were adding value to our lives, compromises were reached and enshrined in law, and as a result new industries blossomed.

Could it be that the guy bootlegging DVDs on the corner is still forcing the film industry to become more efficient, even today? HDTV billionaire Mark Cuban seems to think so, arguing that consumers should be able to view a film “how they want it, when they want it, where they want it.” His company chose to simultaneously release Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh’s film Bubble in cinemas, on DVD, and on HDTV on the same day in 2006. “Name any big-title movie that’s come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release,” Soderbergh told Wired. “It’s called piracy. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Ocean’s Eleven, and Ocean’s Twelve—I saw them on Canal Street* on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We’re just trying to gain control over it.”

The history of piracy repeats itself. By short-circuiting conventional channels and red tape, pirates can deliver new materials, formats, and business models to audiences who want them. Canal Street moves faster than Wall Street. Piracy transforms the markets it operates in, changing the way distribution works and forcing companies to be more competitive and innovative. Pirates don’t just defend the public domain from corporate control; they also force big business and government to deliver what we want, when we want it.

Pirates for the People

More often than commandeering sea platforms, pirates invade media platforms. Who do you think is fighting back against government censorship in China? That guy from the corner again. When Beijing banned the film Memoirs of a Geisha in 2006 for being “socially unhealthy,” pirates stepped in, selling millions of copies and punching through the great wall of propaganda with the invisible hand of the free market. The $565 million market† motivates the pirates who produce 95 percent of all Chinese DVDs sold, but the side effect is free speech on a scale that renders movie censorship irrelevant. “Forbidden things are always attractive,” subversive Chinese blogger Muzimei‡ later said. “The politicians at the top introduce policies. The people at the bottom find a way around them.”

Thanks to advances in technology, people everywhere are running rings around censors and regulators. From citizen journalists to bloggers and those producing and broadcasting their own online content, we are being persuaded away from conventional channels* by a generation of broadcasters with the pirate mentality. Pirate culture is the backbone of the public domain, and the media is just one of many areas being claimed by pirates, for the good of the people—and themselves.

Like many other nouns polite society is fighting against, the war on piracy will rumble on for years to come. But this is a war that will be difficult to win, not just because warring with nouns is ridiculous, but also because history shows, time and again, that society benefits from the work of pirates.

As more of us become them, often just because the entertainment industry is trying to make the recording of anything it can illegal (if you’ve downloaded something without paying for it, or photocopied pages from a book, the entertainment industry thinks you’re a pirate), it’s important to understand the pirate mentality.

So here’s the story of an industry built on pirate culture that wasn’t just born out of piracy, it even grew up on real live pirate ships. It’s a business that still hasn’t found the balance between regulation and creative freedom. It probably never will. But this industry has illegally beamed the work of others all over the world for a century, often giving that work valuable exposure by broadcasting it somewhere it wouldn’t otherwise be heard or seen, increasing its value and opening up entirely new markets. This is the tale of pirate radio.

The Legend of DJ Fezzy

DJ Fezzy is getting ready for his set. It’s a cold, dark Christmas Eve in his studio, and the time is coming up to 9:00 P.M. Fezzy has come prepared for a crazy-hot show, packing an arsenal of scripted material, instruments, and records, set to deliver a sonic blast of talk radio and live music. Then he’ll throw down on the wheels of steel.

At nine o’clock, it’s on. Fezzy grabs the mike, introduces himself, and explains the evening’s program. He then hits the ones and twos, dropping straight into an extra fly new phonograph recording of Handel’s “Largo,” sung by fresh-to-death vocalist of the moment, Dame Clara Butt. Once the record has done its thing, DJ Fezzy draws for his Bible, reading from the Christmas story in the Book of Luke, before picking up his violin and hitting off the audience with a killer solo from Gounod’s “O Holy Night.” And just to prove how versatile he is, Fezzy even sings over it himself.

The man is on fire.

Fezzy’s variety show may not sound too controversial, but it shocked his audience in a way Howard Stern could only dream of.

It was 1906, and DJ Fezzy is broadcasting the first radio show ever.

From the coastal village of Brant Rock, Massachusetts, forty-year-old Canadian professor Reginald Fessenden (“Fezzy” was a nickname given to him by Thomas Edison) was transmitting to an audience of several United Fruit Company ships bobbing up and down in the Atlantic and a smattering of New England ham radio enthusiasts. People were dumbfounded by what they were hearing. Used to receiving only the blips and bleeps of Morse code through the static, they were being subjected to the first ever broadcast of music and the human voice using radio waves, and a technique known as amplitude modulation, which would later be renamed AM radio.

Fessenden is better known as a brilliant inventor on a par with Tesla, Marconi, or Edison, with more than five hundred patents to his name. But he is also technically the first pirate radio DJ. Not only because he didn’t have a license (they didn’t exist yet) but also because he went against the grain, manipulating an existing media format to create what he wanted, regardless of the conventional wisdom. Marconi and Edison laughed and scoffed at Fessenden’s theories about sound waves at first, but those two losers were still messing around with Morse code when DJ Fezzy hit the airwaves.

The New York Herald Tribune later wrote, “It sometimes happens, even in science, that one man can be right against the world. Professor Fessenden was that man. He fought bitterly and alone to prove his theories…against the stormy protests of every recognized authority…. The progress of radio was retarded a decade by this error.”

Fessenden was quickly followed onto the airwaves by other scientists and hordes of ham radio nerds across America. The United States understood the potential of radio from the get-go,* using it to boost troop morale in World War I and launching the first commercial station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, in 1920. Soon, there were more than five hundred commercial stations across the country. But outside of the United States, radio was initially thought of as nothing more than another tentacle of the state, good for broadcasting information and educational programs, too powerful to be turned over to the people. This situation set the scene for one of pirate radio’s most monumental achievements: bringing rock ’n’ roll to Europe.

Rock the Boat

The gap between pirate radio stations in the United States and Europe is almost as wide as the Atlantic itself. In the United States most pirates have traditionally been fun, quirky operations run by hobbyists, who come on air for a few hours at a time and close down after a few days or weeks.† But in Europe, pirate radio is big business. Stations operate around the clock, generating new strains of music and occasionally boatloads of money. Many pirates have even become brands in their own right, selling merchandise and setting up spin-off ventures.

This difference was a result of Europe’s failure to catch on to the potential of commercial radio. And this failure forced Europeans to take to the seas, taking advantage of the fact that it was perfectly legal to broadcast from international waters.

The first legendary European stations weren’t on ships at all. In 1929 Radio Normandie began broadcasting to northwestern France and southern England from an opulent villa in the French town of Fécamp. Radio Paris transmitted from an antenna hoisted atop the Eiffel Tower,* and in 1933, from a country so small the letters of its name won’t fit inside it on most maps, came Radio Luxembourg. Radio Luxembourg boasted what was the world’s single most powerful radio transmitter, which not only allowed it to legally blanket its own tiny homeland but also to reach out to the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and many other parts of Europe where commercial radio was contraband, and where pop music couldn’t be heard on the radio. It was the largest commercial station in Europe by the 1950s, with millions of listeners. Some Europeans claim they learned to speak English just by listening to Radio Luxembourg, but the station’s first language was rock ’n’ roll, and soon enough the whole continent would be fluent.

The legal loophole highlighted by Radio Luxembourg was the gateway to a lucrative new radio market. Quickly others realized that if they were transmitting from outside of nation-states where commercial radio was illegal, they could still legally broadcast to European audiences and sell commercials. The pull of this new rock ’n’ roll music and the potential revenue to be made from advertising were like buried treasure to entrepreneurs around the world, who quickly found their sea legs and began to take to the waters in droves.

Offshore radio exploded in the 1960s, with stations such as Radio Caroline (started by a young Irishman named Ronan O’Rahilly, who for a time also managed some band called the Rolling Stones), Radio Sutch (founded by British pop star/politician Screaming Lord Sutch, operating from another disused sea fort), Radio London (housed on a secondhand U.S. minesweeper and funded by a consortium of Texas businessmen), and at least thirty others patrolling the English Channel transmitting the latest hits to millions of listeners in London and beyond. The rock group the Who even recorded their 1967 album The Who Sell Out as if it were transmitted live from Radio London. But despite what the Who thought, the British government had decided that these particular kids weren’t all right, and legislated heavily against the pirates the same year, making offshore broadcasting illegal and scuppering almost all of them.*

The BBC launched a pirate copy of Radio London, called Radio 1, whose mission, according to Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, was “to take the last breath of wind out of the pirates’ sails.” Some of the original pirates, including Caroline, continue to fight on, many now reincarnated on digital and satellite frequencies. For the most part, the English Channel was returned to the relative calm of ferries, fishing boats, and our friends on Sealand. But although the pirates had lost this particular naval battle, it turned out they’d already won the war.

Coming Up from the Streets

Rather than stopping the pirates, legislation forced them back onto land, where they hit the ground running. This community of pirate entrepreneurs and DJs had revolutionized radio and European society, helping to bring rock ’n’ roll, the top-forty charts, and the very idea of pop music to the people. The British music industry recognized this as commercial radio took off in the 1970s, and rewarded many of them handsomely for their services. Former Radio London and Caroline DJs such as Jimmy Savile, John Peel, and Tony Blackburn were hired by BBC Radio 1, and went on to become household names in the United Kingdom. And as the first generation crossed over and went legit, a new underground was forming in cities across the Continent.

Instead of exposing themselves on the open seas, this new breed of pirates began to operate cloaked in the anonymity of urban sprawl. Switching over to the FM band, pirates in the 1980s and ’90s serviced a new generation of radio listeners in London, Paris, and beyond, listeners more interested in sounds such as soul, hip-hop, house, garage, and techno drifting over from the United States. The powers that be can detect a pirate’s homemade antenna, usually tacked to the top of a tower block, but the studio connected to this antenna by a less powerful (and undetectable) microwave signal, hidden in the concrete labyrinth of a city grid, is difficult to track down. Transmitters are found and confiscated, but studios are harder to find, and stations earning revenue from putting on raves and selling advertising* can afford to replace lost antennae, sometimes within hours. This game of cat and mouse continues to keep pirates operating across the planet today.

The estimated 150 pirate stations on the FM dial in the United Kingdom† act as musical petri dishes—they have spawned new genres and cultures for decades, and attract as much as 10 percent of London’s radio audience. Acid house, hard-core, drum ’n’ bass, U.K. garage, grime, and dubstep are just a handful of now worldwide underground movements that developed in this way. Pirate radio is an incubator where new music can mutate. Initially, the new strains of music it produces are seen as too risqué for the mainstream to touch, but once this music reaches a critical mass in popularity, anthems from the pirates start hitting the pop charts, pirate DJs become crossover celebrities, and the scenes created by these stations grow into cottage industries and worldwide exports.

Brand of Pirates

Kiss FM was one such incubator. Beginning in 1985, it broadcast hip-hop and house to the capital from the suburb of Crystal Palace in South London, one of the highest points in the city. The site gave the station a huge reach over the region, and its roster of incredible DJs‡ kept the listeners locked. By 1990 it was so popular it was granted a license. Kiss went from being a band of pirates to a brand of pirates, and today, as part of the company Emap Performance, it is a multimillion-pound media franchise with spin-off ventures ranging from digital TV channels to package vacations and club tours, which turned over £161 million in 2005. But the execs in charge still recognize where Kiss’s kudos come from, and the station still recruits the hottest pirate DJs directly from the underground frequencies, giving many pirates their big break in the world of legal radio.

“With a pirate, none of the pressures we have are there,” programming director Simon Long told me in 2003. “You can play what you want to smaller groups of people and you have complete freedom; that’s why pirates will always be the breeding ground for new talent…. That’s why at Kiss we’re determined to make sure talented and passionate young DJs have a chance to make it onto legal airwaves.” The BBC and the United Kingdom’s many commercial stations also recruit directly from urban pirates today, which act as a minor league, feeding the major corporate stations the hottest DJs and sounds, already tried, tested, and approved by the pirate listeners. Piracy is tolerated by the radio industry because pirate stations make our music better.

These radio outlaws still exist all over Britain, and continue to be hounded by the authorities. But the music the pirates forge and support is the lifeblood of many of their corporate counterparts. Pirates continue to invigorate communities with new sounds and styles around the clock, generating creativity, innovation, and revenue. And as radio pirates go digital, sounds from the London streets are spilling onto the Internet, attracting global audiences, and building interest in new genres and scenes in faraway places.

Of course, this story of radio piracy is just one frequency in a wider spectrum. Tune the dial out a little farther, and we could listen to pirates generating change in a host of other areas. We would hear how military forces used pirate radio to keep troops’ spirits up in both World Wars, Vietnam, and Iraq. We’d eavesdrop on armies using pirates as tactical weapons, as the United States did when it created Radio Swan, a pirate broadcasting anti-Castro programming into Cuba from Swan Island in the Gulf of Mexico in 1960, and which also was used to send coded messages in the Bay of Pigs invasion.* We’d catch transmissions from the Cold War, when Russia and America continuously broadcast propaganda at one another pirate-style.

If we twist the dial in the other direction, we also would hear pirates working for peace, such as activists who underpinned the draft resistance movement taking to the airwaves in 1970s Australia. We might pick up a new breed of offshore pirates opposed to the Chinese government’s oppressive regime, operating throughout the 1990s from the South China Sea and the Formosa Strait, while another fleet was busy broadcasting peace to the Middle East off the coast of Israel.

If we were to tune out far enough, we would hear the collective buzz of more than two thousand pirate stations that have been operating in the shantytowns of Argentina since 1986, and countless others transmitting from Brazil, Haiti, Mexico City, El Salvador, and across South America. In fact, we would hear pirates on seven continents, giving a voice to those who aren’t being represented, growing new music into flourishing movements, turning the tide of public opinion, and forcing laws and societies to respond more effectively to the wants and needs of their citizens. For some it’s a way to promote a musical freedom of choice not offered by commercial, playlist-driven radio. For others it’s a way to promote freedom, period.

The Tao of Pirates

Pirates highlight areas where choice doesn’t exist and demand that it does. And this mentality transcends media formats, technological changes, and business models. It is a powerful tool that once understood, can be applied anywhere.

Successful pirates adapt quickly to social and technological changes, but this is true of all entrepreneurs. What pirates do differently is create new spaces where different ideas and methods run the show. Some create their own media formats, as DJ Fezzy did with AM radio. Others manipulate formats that already exist to create new choices, as Hollywood did when it created an alternative unlicensed film industry, or as the pirates today bootlegging Hollywood are doing, giving you the option of watching new movies at home (albeit filmed secondhand on a camera phone).

Thinking like a bootlegger can take you in new directions. If you have an idea, but the infrastructure to get it out there does not exist, you may have an opportunity to create your own. Finding a space to get your idea across is as important as having the idea itself. If the idea is good, growing an audience won’t be difficult. It’s this audience that gives pirates their power.

Lao-Tzu, the founder of Taoism, famously said that when leaders lead well, people feel that they did it themselves and that it happened naturally. Pirates are experts at leading communities in this way, bringing people products, services, and sounds they didn’t know they couldn’t live without. Once these new ideas are broadcast, they unavoidably create a Pirate’s Dilemma for others in that market. Should they fight these pirates, or accept that there is some value in what they are doing, and compete with them?

On one side, regulators may argue that pirate stations are illegal and damaging to holders of radio licenses. But radio listeners may ask “Why isn’t there a legal station playing music like this when so many people clearly want to hear it?” Artists may protest that “the pirates play and support my records, when the mainstream stations and stores won’t, and as a result I actually sell more.”

The actions of pirates raise questions, and when they do something society finds useful, it creates productive discussions that often lead to changes in the law, which result in social and economic progress. If democracy is about creating processes that allow people to empower themselves, then pirates are clearly the perfect catalysts for such processes.

Pirate stations in London create this momentum by empowering the DJs who play the music. These DJs are so passionate about the music they play, most pay a monthly subscription fee to the station owner just to play on the radio at all, not to mention risking their liberty for the privilege of creating shows and content that give them and the station credibility. When they strike a chord with their audience, the community spirit of the listeners is also harnessed. This community intimidated the British government so much that they didn’t start trying to close down the offshore stations until they had created the state-sponsored pirate Radio 1 to appease the millions of music fans they knew they would anger. It was the listeners who stood behind Kiss and drummed up enough support for the station, until the buzz reached fever pitch and the authorities had to grant them a license. The Internet community that believes file-sharing networks are vitally important to culture and innovation have never stopped opening new p2p networks as fast as the authorities try to close them down. A good idea is powerful only if people are willing to get behind it. By giving a community a new space that was not previously available to them, you can empower them, and they in turn will propel your idea forward.

In the cases of piracy we have looked at so far, there are two ways in which they win. Either the laws prohibiting them change, or the pirates become so popular the laws are effectively ignored. But the pirate mentality has now been taken on by many who weren’t breaking the law in the first place.

Pirates 2.0

Today every man and his blog are celebrating the power of “Web 2.0.” The idea of a living, breathing Web constantly improving itself is a great one, but it’s underpinned by an old one. On the Web, anyone can broadcast whatever he or she likes to anyone else, the way pirates have for decades. Web 2.0 is all about the pirate mentality.

Pirate radio gave citizens the chance to become DJs, but today a connection to the Internet is all you need to broadcast to the entire world. Individuals with the pirate mentality are using the Web to become journalists, comedians, porn stars, prophets, TV producers, and many other things besides, and it is quite conceivable that the media may one day be conquered by pirates altogether. The big boys know it, and they’re quaking in their corner offices. “Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall,” said Rupert Murdoch in a speech in March 2006. “That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as it does every other business on the planet. Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry, the editors, the chief executives, and let’s face it, the proprietors. A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it.”

The difference is that this generation is not a posse of outlaws on the run from the authorities, but normal people who would never think of themselves as pirates in the first place. But without realizing it, when society went online, it became dominated by the pirate mentality. And nothing illustrates this better than the rise of the blog.

Blogger, Please

In the early 1990s the creation of a new Web page was a rare and wonderful thing. That all changed in 1994 with the arrival of the first bloggers. One of the best known was Swarthmore student Justin Hall and his creation Justin’s Home Page, later renamed links.net. At first he posted some basic information about himself and how to start a blog, some links to other sites, and a picture he found of Cary Grant dropping acid. “Howdy,” Justin wrote, “this is twenty-first century computing…. (Is it worth our patience?) I’m publishing this, and I guess you’re readin’ this, in part to figure that out, huh?”

These days, everyone has pretty much figured out it was. Blogs have gone mainstream, with tens of millions and counting,* providing information on anything and everything. Today there are political blogs left, right, and center, sports blogs, pet blogs, makeup blogs, gadget blogs, shopping blogs, and even blog blogs.†

The mainstream news media are being undermined by bloggers and citizen journalists offering a wider variety of local and niche coverage. But they also are regularly beating the pros at the networks to some of the world’s biggest stories. This is happening because journalism doesn’t work quite as it should anymore. As bloggers dig deeper and wider, the mainstream news networks are becoming increasingly shallow.

In June 2005, the major U.S. network and cable television stations ran 6,248 segments on the Michael Jackson child molestation trial. There were 1,534 segments discussing Tom Cruise, and 405 on a runaway bride from Georgia. Dramatic fighting broke out in eastern Sudan that June, an intensely newsworthy event, especially when one takes into account the largely ignored steady-state genocide in Darfur, which had killed more than four hundred thousand people in the previous two years. A total of 126 segments ran mentioning Sudan. Michael Jackson got fifty times more coverage than what was fast becoming one of the largest humanitarian crises of the decade.

The same way concerns about ratings keep the same selection of playlisted songs rotating on legal radio stations all day, commercial and political pressures have taken a heavy toll on quality news reporting. As legendary U.S. TV news anchorman Dan Rather put it, “It is an obscene comparison…but you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions, and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often. And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism.”

The Pentagon denied that the United States military was using white phosphorus as a weapon in Iraq, until Iraqi bloggers went public with the evidence that they were. The mainstream only picked the story up afterward. Hours after the London 7/7 bombings in 2005, survivors and witnesses were posting firsthand accounts, helping the rest of the world make sense of what had happened, backed up with videos and pictures shot on camera phones. “Increasingly, bloggers are penetrating the preserves of the mainstream news media,” wrote The New York Times. “They have secured seats on campaign planes, at political conventions and in presidential debates, and have become a driving force in news events themselves.” In fact, they now have so much power around the world, they are deciding who gets to run the place.

Citizens on Patrol

Citizen journalists are countering the homogenization of the news media the same way pirate DJs counter bland radio playlists. The online newspaper OhmyNews was established in South Korea in 2000, with a full-time staff of seven people. Today it has a team of thirty-five thousand citizen journalists who provide 80 percent of its content,* which makes it one of the nation’s most powerful media platforms. The OhmyNews motto is “Every Citizen Is a Reporter,” but as founder Oh Yeon Ho says, “The slogan is not only about changing journalism, but about changing all of society.” The organization has gone on to do exactly that. OhmyNews has become so influential, it can and has swung South Korean presidential elections.

When Roh Moo-hyun decided to run in the 2002 presidential race, many South Koreans thought it was a joke. Hailing from a poor farming family, he had escaped poverty through a high school scholarship. He went on to study law by himself, passing the bar exam on his fourth attempt. Moo-hyun became a do-it-yourself success story—a first-rate punk capitalist, making headlines as a human rights lawyer.

But when he ran for president, he found himself without the strong ties to the traditional political elites that other candidates enjoyed. In fact, he had the support of just one congressman. Most of Korea’s conservative newspapers ignored him completely. The odds were not in his favor, but these are exactly the kind of odds the pirate mentality can overcome.

The story of this self-made man inspired hope in many young South Koreans, disillusioned with dirty politics and sick of corruption. In Roh Moo-hyun, they saw a chance to clean things up, and as a result he was able to build a strong grassroots campaign online. His supporters “mobilized the power of the Internet to disseminate information about him faster than traditional media platforms, and encouraged others to participate in the election,” OhmyNews reporter Victor Foo later noted. Soon enough, even without the aid of the mainstream political and media players backing him, Roh Moo-hyun became a contender.

But on Election Day, disaster struck. Just eight hours before voting began, Roh Moo-hyun’s campaign partner, Chung Mong Joon, suddenly withdrew his support, shocking the nation. The mainstream media waded in to deliver Moo-hyun’s campaign the knockout blow. The Chosun Daily newspaper posed this question: “Mr. Chung withdrew his support for Roh. Will you?”

Unfortunately for the old guard, Moo-hyun and his supporters weren’t on the ropes quite yet. Election night saw two worlds colliding. As old media’s printing presses ground to a halt, the new media pirates who supported Moo-hyun jumped into the ring, blindsiding the unsuspecting opposition with a new technique. “They visited many Internet bulletin boards and posted urgent messages such as ‘Mr. Chung betrayed his party, Roh Moo-hyun is in danger. Save the country, please vote for Roh,’” OhmyNews founder Oh Yeon Ho remembers. “They even called their conservative parents to persuade them, crying, ‘If Roh Moo-hyun fails, I will die.’”

OhmyNews updated the story every thirty minutes throughout the long night as thousands pitched in and voiced support. By daybreak, Roh Moo-hyun had emerged victorious, defeating his opponent by a narrow margin, something no one would have predicted just hours earlier.

He gave his first interview as president to OhmyNews.

When Europe wanted to hear rock ’n’ roll, pirates stepped into the breach. Today a new generation is demanding more choice once again, getting their information in new ways. Bloggers are stealing the mainstream media’s thunder, and the mainstream media have responded by trying to buy it back.

Some of the most successful blogs have changed hands for hundreds of millions of dollars, and plenty of bloggers are also cashing in without selling out to the big players. Bloggers (for now at least) don’t face the same commercial pressures that the mainstream media do, but many earn tens of thousands of dollars a week in advertising revenue by offering highly focused niche audiences that the scattergun of big media cannot target. “You wanna reach New York, you buy on Gothamist. You want to reach mommies, you buy on Busy Mom,” Brian Clark, an ad buyer for Audi, told New York magazine. “How does traditional media match that?”

More important, how can traditional media even think about clawing back power from bloggers when pirates are busy seizing the rest of traditional media’s assets?

“Well, if You’re Wondering What Happened…So Am I”

These were the first words uttered by flustered sports reporter Dan Roan on WGN-TV on November 22, 1987, after a TV pirate dressed as 1980s TV icon Max Headroom hijacked the station’s signal. The pirate’s silent transmission jammed the nightly news for twenty seconds, which was transmitting from the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago.* This was a pretty unusual event. It’s incredibly expensive and difficult to jam a TV frequency (the Max Headroom incident remains the most recent in U.S. history), so pirates were never much of a threat to television—until the advent of online video sharing. Today a host of services such as YouTube allow anyone to upload content, both self-made and material ripped from other sources. Pirates are taking over TV the way they took over music, and the networks seem as confused as Mr. Roan about how they should respond.

Some media owners are responding with lawsuits, suing sites such as YouTube for copyright infringement. But just like the smart guys in the commercial radio industry hire pirate DJs, so savvy network bosses are giving pirate TV personalities the chance to take over our living rooms, too. When Andy Milonakis began releasing Webcam recordings of his home-brewed comedy hip-hop freestyles, a body of work with titles such as “Crispy New Freestyle” and “The Super Bowl Is Gay,” he didn’t expect to be recruited to the Jimmy Kimmel Live show in 2003, and he certainly didn’t expect MTV to give him his own show in 2005. “It doesn’t seem real,” he told USA Today. “It’s weird when I’m watching MTV and I hear my own disgusting voice.”

Meanwhile, back on the Web, Amanda Congdon notched up hundreds of thousands of viewers per day with her video podcast Rocket-boom. The struggling actress started cowriting and starring in the two-minute broadcasts in 2004, and her popularity as the presenter soon had book and TV agents knocking at her door. She left Rocket-boom in July 2006 to develop a TV show for HBO, as well as producing new video podcasts for DuPont and also U.S. media network ABC. “One of the best pieces of advice I ever received from an acting coach was to go out there and create your own vehicle,” she told Newsweek. “The Internet allows you to do that.”

The guy in the Prius we met in the introduction is the latest incarnation of the pirate radio DJ. Using an iPod connected to a hacked iTrip, it’s possible to transmit pirate radio podcasts over the FM band in the vicinity around your home or car (even if you’re just broadcasting silence to mute neighboring bass tubes).

Pirates like our friend in the Prius are creating new vehicles such as podcast radio shows, blazing new trails across the mainstream radio landscape. According to Irish technology site Silicon Republic, there are now more podcasts than radio stations, with hundreds more podcasts springing up every day. Some London pirates are now beginning to turn away from pirate radio in favor of podcasts, with several grime MCs and DJs, tired of petty pirate station politics, releasing Internet-only shows for free download (one 2006 offering was imaginatively titled “Fuck Radio”). From the top to the bottom, pirates force the media (and other pirates) to keep up with technological changes, or get left behind.

In the same way that pirate DJs are only as hot as their last show, bloggers are only as hot as their last post, and podcasters are only as cool as their last viral video. With pirates knocking down all barriers to entry, the only way to stay on top is to offer the best content, the most variety, and the latest, most entertaining, and accurate information. Even though anyone can say anything online, with millions of bloggers vetting each other, inaccuracies in stories on the most popular blogs are usually pointed out quickly. Pirates are cracking the whip, and the media is getting leaner and moving faster as a result.

But not everyone using the pirate mentality is a starry-eyed celebrity hopeful looking to break into the tough worlds of media and showbiz. Others are using it for the sake of piracy and piracy alone, and some are gaining so much support, they’re not just electing presidents but also taking over governments themselves.

P for Vendetta

One of the most notorious and widely used Web portals for downloading music, movies, and pirate media of all types is the Swedish site the Pirate Bay. Its Googleesque layout makes it easier to use than an IKEA instruction manual, and it receives more than one million unique users every day. But what long kept the Pirate Bay afloat while many other sites were boarded by saber-rattling copyright lawyers were Swedish laws that permitted such tracker sites to operate.*

“Until the law is changed so that it is clear that the trackers are illegal, or until the Swedish Supreme Court rules that current Swedish copyright law actually outlaws trackers, we’ll continue our activities,” the Pirate Bay’s legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, told Wired in March 2006. “Relentlessly.”

The Pirate Bay is a militant file-sharing space powered by its founders’ desire to defend free culture. Their actions were reactions to the fact that many regulators are arguing that the only way to defend copyright law is to invade and infringe upon people’s rights and privacies. This is already happening—some entertainment companies, for example, have embedded spyware in hardware and software such as DVD players or CD albums that note everything you record. Like all successful pirates, the Pirate Bay’s actions created fierce debate.

On one side is the entertainment industry, scared for its future, as it was in the 1980s, when cassette tapes and video recorders were introduced. Cassette tapes and video recorders both brought the film and recording industries hugely lucrative new revenue streams once they had stopped fighting the new formats and started figuring out how to make money from them.

On the other side of the debate are people eager to consume media in new ways, enjoying the freedom to make back-up copies they always have, who are being threatened with million-dollar fines and prison sentences for what is essentially no different from home taping. The debate over the Pirate Bay’s legality escalated into an international wrangle involving Hollywood, the White House, the World Trade Organization, and the Swedish government. The wrangle became so heated it sparked a new political movement: the Pirate Party.

“Copyright has been said to be necessary for the creation of culture, and patents have been said to be necessary for innovation to happen,” declares the Pirate Party’s website. “This has been repeated so often, that nobody questions it. We do, and we say that it’s just a myth, perpetuated by those who have something to gain from preventing new culture and technology. When push comes to shove, copyright PREVENTS a lot of new culture, and patents PREVENT a lot of innovation. Above all, today’s copyright laws has [sic] no balance at all between the creator’s economic interests and society’s cultural interests.”

The party’s position may seem extreme, but given the history of pirates we’ve taken in, they have a point. Piracy has generated innovation throughout its history. In a world where a paranoid entertainment industry is criminalizing citizens even for legal file-sharing, spying on people through their PCs and forcing them to pay fines far higher than if they actually were stealing CDs or DVDs from a store, some might say it was about time governments pushed back on behalf of their people—the people copyright laws and patents were initially designed to protect.

The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish authorities in May 2006, after the White House threatened the Swedish government with trade sanctions, and the laws there pertaining to tracker sites were changed. But this was not a good idea. The site was back up in just three days, and the raid catapulted support for the Pirate Party to new heights, so much so that the Swedish government is now planning to repeal its laws against tracker sites. The Pirate Party now has close to ten thousand members, lobbying for free culture on a global scale. Outside of Sweden, officially registered Pirate Parties have been started in Spain, Austria, and Germany, while unregistered but active branches exist in the United States, France, Poland, Italy, and Belgium, with more forming in the Netherlands, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Norway. The Pirate Party is showing the world that piracy is one of the most effective forms of civil disobedience. “File-sharing is not a problem, it’s an opportunity,” says Rick Falkvinge of the Pirate Party in the documentary Steal This Film. “There’s a Chinese proverb saying that ‘When the winds of change are blowing, some people are building shelters, and others are building windmills.’”

But the Pirate Bay isn’t just building windmills, it’s also taking over sea forts. In perhaps the most bizarre twist in this story, the Pirate Bay announced it was attempting to buy Sealand* from the Bates family in January 2007, in an international power move that would unite the world’s foremost pirate nation with some of Earth’s most fearsome political pirates. But while pirates took over the media and became a geopolitical force to be reckoned with, the powers that be were already hatching a plan to defeat them.

Fighting the Net

“Net neutrality” is why the Internet is a level playing field. This is the principle that everyone using the Internet has an equal amount of access to everyone else. As inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, defines it: “If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.” Telephone and telegraph networks were both successful because they were network-neutral, and it is why the Web has become such a world-changing force, both economically and socially. This principle has allowed citizens and consumers to seize a great deal of power. Because of Net neutrality, it’s as easy (in most Western countries, at least) to access any blog as it is to access any mainstream news website. When we are given the choice between global mass media and local, homemade varieties, many of us, as we have seen, are choosing the latter. And not everyone is happy about that.

In the United States, some (although by no means all) big media and telecommunications companies are lobbying Congress heavily to overturn Net neutrality. They want to replace it with an undemocratic system, where instead of the Internet just sending you the data you ask for, when you ask for it, websites would have to pay an extra fee to communications companies to guarantee that the data you asked for would be delivered. This would allow Internet service providers to prioritize the data you saw, and even decide whether you should see it at all.

As Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist described it, this would be like trying to order a pizza and being told by the phone company, “AT&T’s preferred pizza vendor is Domino’s. Press one to connect to Domino’s now. If you would still like to order from your neighborhood pizzeria, please hold for three minutes while Domino’s guaranteed orders are placed.”

Other influential voices think it’s already too late for the old establishment to turn back the clock. “It all seems to come down to paranoia vs. opportunity,” commented HDTV magnate Mark Cuban. “Some are paranoid that the telcos will use this to destroy the openness of the Net. The telcos don’t have that kind of leverage anymore.”

While a handful of media and telco companies try to wipe out Net neutrality to serve their short-term interests, their concerns aren’t shared by everyone. As some corporate behemoths gradually, begrudgingly get used to the most recent wave of pirates, many are starting to accept that this is not a battle, but a form of competition—one that is driving them to innovate. “Pirates compete the same way we do—through quality, price, and availability,” said Disney’s cochair Anne Sweeney in a 2006 keynote address. “We understand now that piracy is a business model.*…The digital revolution has unleashed a consumer coup. We have to not only make in-demand content but make it on-demand. This power shift changes the way we think about our business, industry, and our viewers. We have to build our businesses around their behavior and their interests,” she said. “All of us have to continually renew our business in order to renew our brands because audiences have the upper hand and show no sign of giving it back.” Steve Jobs of Apple backed up Disney’s sentiment, telling Newsweek, “If you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it.”

Trolling Deep

If suing customers for consuming pirate copies becomes central to a company or industry’s business model, then the truth is that that company or industry no longer has a competitive business model. A company’s or individual’s ability to make money should be based on their ability to innovate and create value, not file lawsuits. But for some, frivolous lawsuits are the entire business plan.

These companies sometimes get called patent trolls: they don’t invent or make anything themselves, they just buy patents that already exist—or register patents for good ideas already in the public domain. They then track down businesses and individuals already using those ideas, and extort money from them either by suing or threatening to sue. These companies create no value for society at all. The only purpose they serve is to make money by suing other people who are.

Forgent Networks was a company accused by critics of patent trolling when they purchased a patent to JPEG digital image compression in 1997, a widely used technology that had been freely available since 1987. In 2004 Forgent threw lawsuits at forty-four businesses using the JPEG technology, settled out of court with another fifty, and went after more than a thousand others. “It’s the American way,” Dick Snyder, CEO of Forgent, told the Associated Press in March 2006. “We’re just doing what we believe is the right thing to gain value from what we own.”

Microsoft and twenty-one other companies disagreed with Mr. Snyder’s interpretation of the American way, and filed countersuits against Forgent. In May 2006, the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office reinvestigated Forgent’s claim and found the patent to be invalid, because the technology was previously in the public domain. The company abandoned all claims on the patent and walked away, keeping the $90 million it had made licensing the rights to JPEGs to thirty companies.

The negative effect this is having has not gone unnoticed, and laws are being proposed in the United States and many other countries that will make patent trolling of this kind much more difficult in the future. But patent trolls aren’t just going after private businesses; they also have their sites set on our most priceless assets. Our attitude to piracy is important, because what is happening to our freedoms in the world is a troubling sign of things to come elsewhere. There is a race on to patent and control the building blocks of life itself.

Biotech companies are patenting the genetic codes of crops, animals, and even human tissues. The multinational biotechnology corporation Monsanto, for example, has patented a number of seeds, some of which are its own genetically modified mutations, albeit of seeds that took thousands of years to develop naturally before they were patented. The biotech giant has sued farmers for saving, reusing, and sharing these seeds, even though many who have been sued claim they didn’t even know they were using them (it’s common for seeds to blow into fields from neighboring farms). Monsanto and other biotech firms have also developed seeds with “terminator technology,” new strains of sterilized seeds that will not reproduce, like copy-protected MP3 files. Organizations all over the world, from farmers’ unions to human rights and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, are protesting this.

Sharing seeds with family and friends and reusing them for the next year’s harvest is clearly not the same as ripping albums from the Pirate Bay. If you copy a music file illegally, you haven’t taken a material object and deprived someone else from using it. If you stop people from producing food efficiently, on a planet where environmental scientists are warning us that grain stocks are shrinking, our aquifers are drying up, and every living system and life support mechanism Earth has is in decline, you are depriving society of something priceless. And yet it is perfectly legal to patent anything alive (apart from a full-birth human being) and claim ownership of it, from a single strand of DNA to entire species of animals.*

It seems that our economic system is broken. For it to work, we need to be able to trust that corporations and the market will do the right thing and work in the interest of the public good as well as the private. But we are losing our rights and innovation is being stifled because companies using outdated business models and inefficient distribution systems don’t want to switch to the new formats people are being criminalized for using. Meanwhile, economic development is being hampered because of trolls hiding behind and abusing the patent system. When the trust is gone, the system stops working properly. But this in turn produces new breeds of pirates, pushing back in the name of a fairer society when no one else will. Perhaps the noblest pirates out there today are those tackling an issue that literally means life or death for millions of people.

Pirates Without Borders

When regulations and patents are stifling our economies, our environment, and even human life itself, individuals and entire nations have responded with the pirate mentality, raising the stakes with world-changing consequences. And nowhere are the stakes currently higher than in medicine.

Patent trolls going after human gene sequences have already cost us lives. “Companies raced to beat the Human Genome Project in order to patent genes such as that associated with breast cancer,” writes Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. “The value of these efforts was minimal: the knowledge was produced just a little sooner than it would have been otherwise. But the cost to society was enormous: the high price that Myriad, the patent holder, places on genetic tests (between $3,000 and $4,000) may well mean that thousands of women who would otherwise have been tested, discovered that they were at risk, and taken appropriate remediation, will die instead.”

There are more than 40 million people around the world living with HIV/AIDS, including 640,000 children under age fifteen. Because patents allow drug companies to maintain a monopoly on new medicines they develop, and charge highly inflated prices, the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most profitable industries in the world. Billions of dollars are spent developing new drugs, including those that fight HIV/AIDS. With that level of investment, there need to be incentives and protections in place so companies will continue to develop new medicines that benefit society. This is fair. But in practice it doesn’t work very well.

Western drug companies don’t sell many AIDS drugs in developing countries because more than 90 percent of the people in the world suffering from HIV/AIDS can’t afford to pay inflated Western prices. And because these companies make a profit only when they have the monopoly, measures are taken by drug companies to extend the life of these patents for as long as possible, preventing cheap generic drugs from entering their foreign or domestic markets. The drugs do work, but the patents don’t. As a result, according to the World Health Organization, some three million people die every year.

Never before has an industry needed piracy so badly. And one such pirate who is making major waves is Dr. Yusef Hamied of the Mumbai pharmaceutical company Cipla. When his company produces generic drugs for the West, they are thought of as a legitimate and well-respected organization. But when Dr. Hamied began producing anti-HIV drugs for the developing world in the year 2000 for as little as $1 a day* compared to Western prices of more than $27 a day, he was branded by the former head of GlaxoSmithKline as a “pirate and a thief.”

“We have offered to pay royalties,” Dr. Hamied told Positive Nation magazine in 2003. “Nobody denies that patents are valuable and that the person who invents a drug should be adequately rewarded. But not obscenely rewarded. We believe in patents but we don’t believe in a monopoly.”

Shannon Herzfeld, a spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, disagrees with his position. “We object to their premise that intellectual property rights are a barrier to access to good medicine,” she told The New York Times. “Anyone who says, ‘We have to steal’ is wrong. Stealing ideas is not how one provides good health care.”

The World Trade Organization (WTO) voted on the issue of countries deciding for themselves if they could import cheap generic drugs in a national health crisis at its 2001 meeting in Dohar. A total of 143 countries voted in favor of this. One, the United States, voted against it. The United States won.

When the market fails and democracy is ignored, pirates should step into the breach. In this case, it was governments in the developing world who became pill pirates, providing better health care precisely by stealing ideas. In India, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Egypt, and China, private and state-run enterprises are ignoring international patent laws written in the interests of profit, churning out generic versions of vital drugs at a fraction of the cost, saving and improving millions of lives as a result.

Because India didn’t recognize intellectual property rights in medicine or agriculture since 1970,* pharmaceutical companies there were able to reverse-engineer cheap drugs and pesticides based on Western formulas, and life expectancy in India has gone up from forty years in 1970 to sixty-four years today.

The pill pirates put an international spotlight on the issue, and although there is a long way to go, some Western drug companies have now cut the prices of AIDS drugs to Africa by 80 percent, and the pressure is on for other pharmaceutical giants to do the same. But as Dr. Javid A. Chowdhury, the Indian minister of health, noted in The New York Times, “If they can offer an 80 percent discount, there was something wrong with the price they started off with.”

Losing Patents

The WTO wouldn’t grant developing nations patent relief instead of drug discounts, even though the majority of its members voted in favor of doing so. So those nations became pirates, and fought back against the WTO’s cheap imitation democracy. Now that nations of pirates are challenging patent laws head-on, some are saying that in the case of health care, it is time these laws changed. The pharmaceutical industry is a perfect example of the system gone wrong. Drug companies make much bigger profits from selling Viagra or Botox to rich people than they can from developing AIDS or malaria drugs for poor people. Patents are not helping drug companies to break this bad habit. The debate created by the pill pirates just might.

Former chief economist of the World Bank Joseph E. Stiglitz is one of many who think there is another solution. Patents protect ideas, but they are ultimately inefficient because they restrict the use of knowledge, something that in this case clearly benefits us all. Instead, Stiglitz and others have put forward the idea of a medical prize fund, which would reward those who discover cures and vaccines. Governments, alongside pharmaceutical giants, already foot the bill for a great deal of pharmaceutical research.* If governments are funding research already, Stiglitz argues, they could finance a prize fund that rewards drug companies for developing treatments or preventions for diseases affecting hundreds of millions of poor people, something patents do not do efficiently. He suggests:

When it comes to diseases in developing countries, it would make sense for some of the prize money to come from foreign assistance budgets, as few contributions could do more to improve the quality of life, and even productivity, than attacking the debilitating diseases that are so prevalent…. The type of prize system I have in mind would rely on competitive markets to lower prices and make the fruits of the knowledge available as widely as possible. With better-directed incentives (more research dollars spent on more important diseases, less money spent on wasteful and distorted marketing), we could have better health at lower cost.

Pirates are forcing decision makers to reconsider the use of patents, and now the idea of a prize system is getting support, not just for developing countries, but also for Western markets. “Under a drug prize system,” wrote Forbes magazine in April 2006, “the U.S. government would simply pay cash for the rights to any drug that wins FDA approval, then put the U.S. rights in the public domain. Voilà! a free market in the manufacture and sale of new drugs. Generic drugs (“generic” being another way of saying the rights are in the public domain) already do a wonderful job of keeping prices down. While the price of patent-protected drugs has been rising at roughly twice the rate of inflation, the real price of generics has fallen in four of the last five years.”

Medicine is an industry where the social benefits of piracy are clear, and the social costs of putting profit and intellectual property rights before people are horrifying. Yet the needless death of millions of people every year, in the name of economic growth, is the still the status quo. Patents are important, but in cases where they shut out the positive forces of the free market and have a negative effect on society, it’s clear they need to be replaced.

Many such patents are actually owned by the U.S. taxpayers, and could easily be turned over to the World Health Organization, the United Nations, or the developing world. Will the United States, a nation built on piracy itself, ever allow this to happen? That all depends on whether there is still honor among thieves.

The Three Habits of Highly Effective Pirates

From the birth of America to the birth of the Internet, it is often left to pirates to chart the winds of change and plot better courses for the future. When pirates start to appear in a market, it’s usually an indication that it isn’t working properly. When governments and markets recognize the legitimacy of what these pirates are doing, their activities are enshrined in new laws, creating a new order that serves society better.

We live in a new world where things we used to pay for, such as music, movies, and newspapers, are now available for free. But things that used to reproduce for free, such as seeds and pigs, have to be paid for. This is a world where we all need to understand the finer points of the pirate mentality:

Power to the Pirates

Piracy has gone on throughout history, and we should encourage it. It’s how inefficient systems are replaced.

Wherever you tune in, somewhere you will find a pirate pushing back against authority, decentralizing monopolies, and promoting the rule of the people: the very nature of democracy itself. The pirate mentality is a way to mobilize communities, drive innovation, and create social change. By thinking like pirates, people grow niche audiences to a critical mass and change the mainstream from the bottom up. They’ve toppled more inefficient corporate pyramids than they’ve invented styles of music, and as long as there are people or choices not being represented in the marketplace, there will always be pirates pushing the envelope. Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Pirates are some of the most committed citizens we’ve got.

Many pirates aren’t just copying the work of others. Some give this work new meaning by broadcasting it somewhere else. But as we shall now see, there are pirates reinventing the work of others entirely, using a process that gives them a unique perspective, a powerful tool we can all use to create change.