Jan 25th 10 Posted by justin in teaching

Mason – “The Tao of Pirates: Sea Forts, Patent Trolls and Why We Need Piracy”

• 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.