Abstract
The image of the computer hacker, for many, may be forged by pop culture and news mediathink – think Matthew Broderick’s underachieving high school computer whizz who nearly brought the world to thermo nuclear war by hacking into the government’s computers in the 1983 movie War Games.
News accounts also depict the hacker as a brilliant pirate intent on flouting the law either for political or economic gain or just plain fun. Contemporary news accounts of stolen credit card data from big box retailers, identity theft, and other cybercriminal activities are also closely identified with hackers.
Perhaps the computer hacker’s image, self-image, and identity itself are due for a bit of reverence if not respect. E. Gabriella Coleman’s book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking may be just the document for that image overhaul. In fact, Coleman, the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University, holds computer hackers as well as creators of free open software as pillars of democracy.
Coleman, a cultural anthropologist, takes a look at the hacker and coder as the subject of her study. Hackers, she writes, “sit simultaneously at the center and the margins of liberal tradition.” This study is her ethnography of the computer world and the underworld where hackers and coders both collaborate and compete. She names a handful of coding pioneers and hackers and explains some of their motivations to break the codes and share these “crown jewel” algorithms that make computers the tools that regular people can operate. She even points to a loose code of ethics among hackers.
The book draws on her extensive study of hackers, coders, moguls, and even politicians. Coleman’s intricate knowledge of her topic, its doctrines, players, and existing scholarship also brings meaning to the alphabet soup of acronyms, abbreviations and computer terms. She literally opens her book by defining free and open-source software (F/OSS), which is similarly woven throughout as sort of a democratized principle which challenges our conception of both the purpose of computer programs and the role of intellectual property law.
She writes, I argue that F/OSS draws from and also rearticulates elements of the liberal tradition. Rather than designating only a set of explicitly held political, economic, or legal views, I treat liberalism in its cultural registers. Free software hackers culturally concretize a number of liberal themes and sensibilities—for example, through their competitive mutual aid, avid free speech principles, and implementation of meritocracy along with their frequent challenge to intellectual property provisions.
While detail-oriented with an insider’s understanding of the computer world, Coding Freedom becomes relevant for lay people thanks to the mass market personal and home computing explosion developing in the 1970s and 80s, the dotcom and Silicon Valley boom from the 1990s, and the social media revolution from the past decade.
Although the commercialization of the Internet has been lauded as the great opening for freedom of speech and expression, Coleman also questions whether the intellectual property laws that fostered the home computer and digital revolutions might also be holding back those same freedoms. Coleman explains the development of commercial software that we take for granted today, which created vast financial fortunes, as a major development in the computer industry. Once upon a time, software was bundled with hardware and not a separate product. The freedom to break down other computer programs, develop new programs, and sell them is important not only to the computer industry, but possibly the country, too.
These explosions may have put computers in every home and connected the planet through the Internet and made billionaires out of a generation of computer geniuses. But it has also bred an interesting tension between sharing computer knowledge and protecting that knowledge through intellectual property laws.
She writes, Even if the court cases never declared source code as First Amendment speech, the arrests, lawsuits, and protests cemented this connection. Hackers, programmers, and computer scientists would continue to be motivated to transform what is now their cultural reality—a rival liberal morality—into a broader legal one by arguing that source code should be protectable speech under the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of other nations.
The development of American intellectual property law, Coleman notes, made billionaires out of programmers such as Bill Gates and Paul Allen and powerful corporate behemoths out of companies such as IBM. At the same time, these laws, Coleman argues, limit subsequent use by hackers or others without licenses from these corporations.
The government’s expansion of intellectual property extensions including the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, the Digital Millennial Copyright Act, and even the move to classify copyright infringement as a felony in some instances, has fortified intellectual property owners and further imperiled the hackers or coders who want to build on the work of others.
Even so, Coleman points out that computer code is really just another set of laws. But it is also a form of speech. How this form of speech is defined and protected, punished and preserved, and censored and censured remains a source of developing law and standards. Coleman gives us more to think about as both law and attitudes relating to code and hackers continue to grow and develop.