Mason – “The Tao of Pirates: Sea Forts, Patent Trolls and Why We Need Piracy”
Posted by justin on Monday, January 25, 2010 · 1 Comment
- Forms of piracy in this article:
- Radio
- Music – origins
- Film – origins
- Cable – origins
- Internet/P2P networks
- Blogs – origins
- Journalism – how should we be teaching it?
- Online media content/web 2.0
- Free culture movements
- Tape technologies
- As a business model?
- Biotechnologies / biomedical industries and their relation to ethnic cultures
- Medicine
- Issues of information ownership are central to the HavenCo/Bates family partnership.
- Digital replication is an essential quality of pirate technologies. The computer age has enabled this.
- Pay special attention to definition C on pg. 4 of Mason’s article. “A guardian of free speech who promotes efficiency, innovation, and creativity, and who has been doing so for centuries.”
- Problems of definition – who is a pirate and who is an innovator?
- Piracy confronts problems of distribution and ineffeciencies in capitalist markets. They encourage consumer choice and wait for cooptation.
- Piracy enables free speech (China example) and the unfettered proliferation of information against statist regimes.
- Mason spends a good deal of time talking about pirate radio in this chapter. Tracing the work of DJ Fezzy, Mason demonstrates how the manipulation of existing media formats creates innovation . . . in this case, radio.
- Most piracies become legitimated and then fight piracies.
- Pirate radio uses:
- Entertainment
- Political activism
- Commercial
- Web 2.0 and piracy are intimately linked.
- The effects of piracy and self-distribution via internet networks might spell the demise for large-scale media conglomerates.
- Long tail economics and niche markets are enabled by blogging.
- Can you “own” culture? Why/how?
- How is piracy a form of civil disobedience?
- What is the role of net neutrality in the piracy debate?
- “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.”
- Three characteristics of pirates:
- Look outside the market – Pirates don’t look for gaps inside the market, but gaps outside the market itself.
- Create a vehicle – Pirates create new mediums of distribution – vehicles for the transport of media – where none existed before.
- Harness your audience – Pirates mobilize their audiences to support their position. Enrollment of the mass culture ensures legislative change.
Justin,
Do you share your blog with your students?