Uncommon knowledge. In the NYT business section today (a place where politics goes to die), John Markoff reports on a new round shaping up in the war between P2P filesharing and the corporate power opposed to it, using anonymous, trust-based networks called "darknets": and introduces the subject, tellingly, from the vantage of threatened corporate prerogative:

Briefly buoyed by their Supreme Court victory on file sharing, Hollywood and the recording industry are on the verge of confronting more technically sophisticated opponents.

At a computer security conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, an Irish software designer described a new version of a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that he says will make it easier to share digital information anonymously and make detection by corporations and governments far more difficult.

My own quick reaction to this, by contrast, was to be thankful that Ireland's still a more or less free country.

The question is, how much of a cretin do you have to be to write this, as a third-graf summary of the case for readers who won't go any farther—

Others have described similar efforts to build a so-called darknet that aims to shield the identities of those sharing information. The issue is complicated by the fact that the small group of technologists designing the new systems say their goal is to create tools to circumvent censorship and political repression - not to abet copyright violation.

when barely an inch down the page you follow it with this:

The Irish programmer, Ian Clarke, is a 28-year-old free-speech advocate who five years ago introduced a software system called Freenet that was intended to make it impossible for governments and corporations to restrict the flow of any kind of digital information. ... Though he says his aim is political - helping dissidents in countries where computer traffic is monitored by the government, for example - Mr. Clarke is open about his disdain for copyright laws, asserting that his technology would produce a world in which all information is freely shared.

Cretinous enough, I guess—so cocooned in corporatist ideology, so glibly, thoughtlessly certain that there's no politics in the politics of copyright and "intellectual property"—as to be deaf to the contradiction between what you claim the P2P activists are doing and what they actually say they're doing.

The late-20th century stealth revolution of enclosure—which is destroying the American intellectual commons as surely as the English agricultural commons was destroyed two centuries earlier—is in its very late stages now. It involves and is a form of political repression every bit as much as, even often as nakedly as, the direct government-sponsored censorship of speech. (BTW, if you've never read Seth Finkelstein, blogging his unhappy experience as a foot soldier in the DMCA wars, this is as good a time as any to start.) It's a revolution against which copyright violation is, as far as I'm concerned, a form of (for the most part sadly unconscious) guerrilla warfare. I'm far from imagining that a New York Times tech reporter would demonstrate any sensitivity to Free Culture-style critique. I might have hoped, though, that he'd show at least a glimmer of awareness that such critique existed—or that when people talk about freedom, and create tools to realize it, that's a political act.

posted by michael  2:17:30 PM  
tell me about it []  trackback []