Manifesto for Free Culture

Anonymous

Contents
1 2 3 tl;dr A Call To Arms The 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Five Points Boycott hoarded media. . . . . Liberate our collective culture. Become an active node. . . . . Nurture free culture. . . . . . . Express yourself freely. . . . . . 1 2 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 7

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Start Now. About the author

1 tl;dr
The people who built the world of pirated content and free sharing are being imprisoned, threatened, persecuted. Until now most pirates have participated passively or semipassively in a culture run by dedicated volunteers. Now we have come to a point where either copyright hoarders or pirates will soon cease to exist. It isnt enough to be in favour of sharing, to vote, speak up or petitition. We all have to protect sharing actively and consciously. Here are ve ways to do so: I Make sure you dont contribute a cent to companies that hoard copyrights. II Get hold of anything you can which is copyrighted and isnt yet available freely through piracy. III Become an active sharer dont just upload and seed but compile, translate, repackage and remix. IV Support in every way people who share their work. Donate. V Become an artist, writer, performer, coder or designer and share whatever you can of the things you make. 1

2 A Call To Arms
Piracy has become a way of life, but nowit has to ght for its life. The strength and agility of our community has allowed piracy to go from a marginal activity to something that most young people (and many, many older ones) see as an normal form of cultural interaction. However, the ease and ubiquity of accessing pirated materials can lead all of us to become complacent. Without the bravery and the hard work of a few pioneers, a whole world of pirated content would not be available to us. These people are now being thrown into jail like Anakata, having their businesses expropriated like Kim Dotcom, being persecuted until they commit suicide like Aaron Swartz. The generation that thought dierently about networked communication and the exchange of ideas, then acted on these thoughts, is being picked o and made an example of. Behind every one of these visionaries, there are hundreds of people whose names we dont know. They are the collaborators and contributors, the people who picked up the torch of free culture and used it to create sites, forums, release groups, tools. Without these people the work of the pioneers would have had no eect. Torrent sites would be empty of content, boards would go unmoderated, keys and cracks would not be written, nothing would be scraped, capped, ripped or packaged. It is a simple fact that every single person sharing today is doing it because of long hours spent behind a screen by many people of whom they know almost nothing, often not even a nickname. These people are next in the copyright cartels sights. The dozens of famous hackers and rebels who we have seen get arrested and extradited, denounced by the MSM and framed by the copyright police cannot save free culture. The tens of thousands of obsessives who obtain, decrypt, encode, prepare, package and make available pirated content cannot save free culture. The so-called rule of law, twisted as it is by corrupt politicians, industry lobbyists, and the moral outrage of the media, will tear through these people and all they have achieved, brave and determined as they are. The only thing that can prevent the hoarders reversing our revolution is each person in the culture sharing community standing up for what they know to be right. The time for equivocating, saying one thing but doing another, and hoping that someone else would protect our freedoms is over. If sharing wins, then the copyright industries will be destroyed, and for sharing to lose, all freedom of communication and expression will have to be wiped out. The only thing that can secure victory is mass resistance and disobedience on every cultural battleground. The person who has to act to make this happen is you.

3 The Five Points

3.1 Boycott hoarded media.
The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. 2

He degrades and simplies the client. Everytime we pay for culture, we have to ask ourselves two questions. Does the product I am paying for limit my freedom of expression? And is the organization I am giving money to hoarding and restricting freedom in other ways? The rst question is the easier one. Just imagine everything that you want to do with what you paid for. Do you want to lend it to your friend, resell it, remix it or take it apart? For your freedom to be respected, you should be able to do whatever it is that you want, not just legally, not just without disapproval, but easily. In other words, encryption or protection that can be circumvented (all of it) is still denying your freedom, if it makes it much harder to use the product than it should. The second question is trickier. For some people everyone involved in the copyright business, or even everyone involved in selling things for money, is denying freedoms by deliberately creating scarcity. There is some room for compromise here. Copyright trolls and monopolists keep pirates in line not by suing all of them, but by acting disproportionately against a few of the most prolic to scare the rest. This is a tactic we need to borrow. Those companies who go out of their way to sue, to lobby, and to produce defective goods, need to feel the backlash on their bottom line. The rest of them just need to be aware of us. This goes for artists too. If you put a copyright symbol on something and sell it because it allows you to pay your bills, good luck to you. If you choose to speak out in an ill-informed way against piracy and accuse your fans of stealing from you, you need to be reminded that most people buying books, music and lms are also pirates. But what about all the stu youll miss? You have two choices: get hold of it a dierent way or watch something else. The rst means either piracy or nding a supplier who is less evil. So not only do you keep your cash away from copyright trolls, you support new business models that dont involve blackmail, threats and DRM. The other choice can be be both dicult and fun. There is enough content on YouTube to watch for several lifetimes, enough completely free music and books out there to last you forever, but sometimes you want a 90-min lm about explosions or love between cowboys rather than a 4 min lm about cats. Some people have suggested an almost total boycott of Hollywood movies: dont go and see one unless you have some reason to think it will be very good. This is an excellent idea which should be extended to a lot of other industries.

3.2 Liberate our collective culture.

Corporal Snark began giving Major de Coverley eat. Major de Coverley turned from the counter with his tray full and came to a stop. His eyes fell on the groups of other ocers gazing at him in mute appeal, and, with righteous belligerence, he roared: Give everybody eat!

Culture belongs to everyone. If youve heard about Cinderella, not only do you have the right to retell her story, but sometimes you absolutely have to. We all know the story, so sometimes the only way to explain something is to mention the shared reference. The same should apply if you want to talk about Mickey Mouse. If you are making a documentary and you need to include a bit of one of his lms, same thing applies. Mickey is in all of our consciousness, so the idea of Mickey belongs to us all. However, there are around 100 years of history for which a lot of the cultural output of society, and almost all of the popular stu, is being hoarded for commercial purposes. Things from before 1900 are usally out of copyright, and the only digital format that existed was text, so there is less that can be copied. The last few years have seen an explosion of free and open content which is up on the Web. But most of what was made in the 20th century that still exists, has been locked down. A lot of it can now be accessed for free, like all twenty-two Chicago albums. But lots lots more isnt out there yet. We cant be happy with all the really famous and popular content being easy to download. Its not even enough to say that everything you can buy on Amazon you can get for free. We need to do better than the hoarders. One reason copyright is such an unacceptable system, is that unpopular works, which still might be amazing, get orphaned by their owners and cant be found anymore. What if youre one of four people in the world who had their lives changed by some obscure lm and now you cant watch it anymore? The solution is that when you track it down, you share it and give the three other a chance to get it o you. Ripping, scanning, scraping and capping can be pretty boring and seem thankless. The brilliant part of it is that the le you put up will be kept alive by the whole rest of the community, potentially for the rest of eternity. This is even more likely if you nd something no-one else has done yet. Even partial les or raw data that needs encoding or formatting will make life easier for the next link in the chain.

3.3 Become an active node.

Talking of links in the chain, its time to think about your position in the network. Sharing is for everyone, and sharing is what makes a real community. If you havent understood yet that you shouldnt be a leech, youre probably not ready to read this. Seeding and sharing links is great, and its what keeps torrents and les alive. But a few people producing content and everyone else passing it along is a fragile network that can easily be attacked. A truly resilient network is one where you have to break almost every connection to stop the ow. This means that every communication channel that makes sense has to be used. This applies on a number of levels. Whenever you know that you can get hold of something somewhere, and other people dont have it, pass it on to them. Be the connection between dierent sites, dierent methods of downloading, dierent communities. If youre a coder or a sysadmin, great, because you can work on cracks, proxies and forums. But if you have no technical knowledge at all you can still participate. Storing everything you download in case you cant get hold of it any more one day is great, but its just a start. How can you get content to people who arent in the network? 4

Where can it be put to be more redundant and more available? What networks can you start or join, from free wireless APs to disc-copying and book-lending groups. Everyone currently on the web has access to somewhere they can upload les to. Put your 3 favourite pdfs or mp3s or whatever there. If you get told o/banned/legally threatened, take them down. Then put something else up somewhere else using another account. Repeat as required. If everyone did this every single possible le would be a Google search away. Email les or magnet links to your friends each week. Upload your mixtapes to lesharing sites. Make collections that you grabbed from one place available on other sites or networks. Burn DVDs of les and leave them on the bus or in public libraries. Write howtos for everything: downloading, proxies, getting round paywalls and asking for stu politely on piracy forums. Right now it would be very dicult for governments and business to stop piracy wtihout shutting down the Internet. We need to make it impossible to stop even if they do shut down the Internet.

3.4 Nurture free culture.

You have 5000 people who like you, and they all give you 10 a year, thats a living. There are two main ways we need to nurture people who are making stu and putting it out there for free. If we like what they do we have to tell our friends, and if we really like what they do we have to give them some money. Independent record shops used to be a place where you could nd other people who were into the stu you were into. There were listening posts where you could try before you buy and noticeboards where people would post adverts looking for band members. These shops are never coming back. The Internet is a giant noticeboard that reaches around a million times more people and where you can listen to anything you like. The bands in the 80s and 90s that were loved by the underground until they sold out and got massive were, in a lot of cases, just trying to reach everyone they thought would like it, and maybe make enough money that they wouldnt have to tour 11 months a year for the rest of their lives. To do that they had to sign up with big record labels, do interview with national publications, and appear on TV. You dont have to do that anymore. Nowadays people get famous virally, and then traditional media has to feed o them to stay current. The people who know you best are about a million times more likely than a magazine to be able to predict what you might like. Of the videos youve seen on YouTube, how many did you hear about via email, blogs, Twitter, chat? Not only do you nd most of the best things through interpersonal communication, but whenever you read about a YouTube video in the corporate media it usually turns out to be something you already knew about. There are millions of great people out there making stu and putting it online. For each of them to reach the audience they need, someone has to be the rst, second, third and fourth person to like it and pass it on.

Finally, everyone plans to donate, but not quite enough people actually do. If the free, digital world didnt exist and you couldnt get stu o the Internet, you might go take $40 or EUR 30 to a shop on payday and spend it on a couple of DVDs or CDs or books. Take the 40 bucks or whatever and put it on your PayPal account. Think of all those people whose music made you wish they would make more music, or whose writing you admire, or whose project is, unbelievably, free despite being stunningly good, and give them a nice tip each. Youll feel a bit like you do when you come out of the shop, but without the hollow feeling when you get the stu home. Poor? Dont worry about it then.

3.5 Express yourself freely.

Interviewer: How does postal art t into the bigger picture? Ben Vautier: We are the bigger picture. Before the invention of the gramophone record and the radio there was no such thing as a consumer of music. People who bought music bought sheet music, which they took home and sang or played on the piano. Every consumer was also a performance, and every new performance was unique. People paid to attend concerts, but they were participating in a collective act of music-making which took place in real-time, even if they didnt make any noise. Nowadays almost everyone listens to music, often almost constantly, but many people cant, or believe they cant, sing or play an instrument. The record industry turned music from something living into something that could be bought. They turned around the relationship between famous performers and everyone else who makes music. The rst records were trying to recreate in a studio what people were doing for themselves everyday in their homes. Eventually people making music in their bedrooms were seen as trying to climb onto a ladder of becoming recording artists and getting famous. By reading but not writing, watching but not liming, spectating sport but not playing it, we lose something of ourselves. The cultural material we have access to might improve in quality, but we become more passive and less emotionally connected to it. Imagine the dierence in the understanding of sex between someone who had had sex, even not very good sex, even only once, and someone who has only ever watched porn. The solution to this is for all of us to start singing, painting, acting, and producing all forms of artistic expression. We wouldnt tolerate artists who didnt love the things they make, so why do we let ourselves o from making the type of things we love? Write a book. If you write 600 words a day for four months you will have written your rst book. Thats an hour of writing. Once youve written it, you might not get it published or even nd anyone that wants to read it. But you will never see the world, books or your own thoughts in the same way again. You will know if you want to write another one and if you do it will be innitely better. Design a logo. Create a collage. Make a piece of abstract music, a game, a webpage. The digital tools for doing these things available to amateurs are innitely better now 6

than what professionals have ever had in the past. It isnt true that you can can make something amazing without any talent, inspiration or hard work. But with just a little bit of each you will be able to make something beautiful and unique. One big reason we often dont attempt things like this is because we worry that what we make wont be good enough, or that no-one will be interested in it. We have been trained to expect polished professionalism, and to judge culture by its popularity. Put out of your mind any thoughts of becoming professional or famous or rich. Try to do something youre bad at or have never tried, that way you know youre not doing it to compete with the best. Making something rough, or even something bad, is such a buzz compared to consuming something passively that you will generate yourself the energy you need to get better or try something new. You dont even have to record anything you make. Music vanishes out soon as the notes have ended, and you can delete your les, throw away your notebooks when full or even teach yourself to draw on an Etch-a-Sketch if it helps you not be overcome by the thought of the nal result. When you do this, you will see the books, lms, songs that you tried to imitate becoming richer and more real. As you slowly learn to play your rst three chords, the guitar playing you listen to will change and develop, adding extra dimensions and colors. Even the most basic beginner has an understanding in common with the genius and the virtuoso that the onlooker can never hope to grok.

4 Start Now.
You have two choices. Do something today or let things stay the way they are forever. There is no such thing as tomorrow. If youve read this far, you need to do something now towards any one of the 5 points except the rst one (which is about not doing something). In approximate order of ease and immediacy: Give $5 to a project or artist whos doing it for free. Its literally hard not to have someone in mind if youre on the Internet at all. (If you really dont have ve bucks, dont worry. Someone else will give ten.) Upload something you have on your computer, even if its just a collection of things you downloaded elsewhere. Make something. Find a site that requires registration, membership, IP addresses in certain countries, or just has an annoying interface. Figure out how to get some of the information out so that it can be shared.

5 About the author

Some time between rst reading the retractable batons letters and the MegaUpload takedown, Anonymous got serious. 7