Misuser Inventions and the Invention of the Misuser: Hackers, Crackers and Filesharers

Abstract

The conflicts which have erupted over hacking, cracking and filesharing offer a stepping-stone for rethinking the involvement of users in innovation processes. As technical design processes invariably proceed in the shadow of established relations of social power, we can expect them to encompass conflicts over what constitutes the creative use of technology versus its misuse. The figure of the misuser calls attention to the importance of antagonistic relations in the mutual shaping of technology and society. Constructivist STS research has been criticised for neglecting the importance of antagonistic relations in favour of an emphasis on the limitless mutability of human/machine hybrids. The transformative effects of innovation processes on interests and subjectivities cannot be denied. But the induction of such transformations might be interpreted as a method through which struggles are conducted. This dynamic is particularly forthcoming in the case of filesharing, where users innovate precisely in order to overthrow the material practices upon which intellectual property law is founded. It is the intervention of law enforcement agencies in the process of drawing the line between users and misusers that makes the presence of an antagonistic relation manifest.

Keywords:

• Filesharing
• hacking
• cracking
• innovation
• misuse
• antagonistic relations

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, Les Levidow, Kean Birch and Mark Elam for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

The hacker is someone who primarily develops software code and the cracker is the name for those who break into computer systems. This straightforward definition will later be problematised and discussed as an example of how the misuser is constructed. The filesharer tends to be less knowledgeable about computers but utilises the tools made available by hackers and crackers in order to share information, often but not necessarily in violation against copyright law.

Though the title suggests otherwise, the discussion never gets close to experiences of technology at the shop-floor. The main concern in the field study presented in the book, conducted by Woolgar at a computer manufacturing firm, centres on the discursive separation between the firm and its customers. The company is treated as an organic, well-oiled machine, and there is nothing to indicate that Woolgar has looked for or reflected over the presence, or absence, of discord inside that organisation (Grint & Woolgar, 1997).

Here Marc Berg makes labour process theory into something of a strawman. He does not take into account the developments within this tradition in the aftermath of the so-called Braverman debate. Scholars subscribing to labour process theory tried to describe in richer nuances the inter-dependence between workers and management, sometimes building on the work of Michel Foucault (Knights & Vurdubakis, 1994).

Most countries extended their copyright law to include software codes in the 1980s in response to pressure from computer companies (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 171; Newman, 2002). The same firms are now demanding that software should be protected under patent law (Klemens, 2006). This is already the case in the US and Japan while attempts to introduce software patents in the EU have been stalled by strong opposition from hackers, activists and small- and medium-sized computer firms. Extension of the patent system is in line with the rapid growth of intellectual property rights more generally. The academic literature on the topic is vast and I can only hint at some of the writings here (Maskus, 2000; Matthew, 2002; Sell, 2003; McLeod, 2003, 2007).

The difference between these two ways of doing politics is not absolute. Hackers have also engaged in traditional forms of lobbying and street demonstrations. Their successful campaign in 2005 against the introduction of software patents in the EU is a case in point.

See http://www.winehq.org/ (accessed 14 February 2009).

The notion of a ‘community of hackers’ is, of course, problematic too. The notion that hackers and other Internet devotees belong to virtual communities was first proposed by Howard Rheingold (2000). His book sparked off a heated exchange on whether the Internet could be said to harbour any communities or merely be a substitute for them in the real world. Though the term has since become widely accepted, inflation of its use has led scholars to once more ask what is meant by ‘community’ (West & Lakhani, 2008). As for this article, I follow Maria Bakardjieva's retrospective of the virtual community debate. The demarcations between ‘real–virtual’, and ‘public–private’, which this debate hinged on, do not take us very far when we want to explore how the Internet is used. The togetherness and common action enabled due to communication through (private) computer terminals spans both of these demarcations making them valid to study in their own right (Bakardjieva, 2005).

This somewhat abstract claim can be substantiated with an observation by Yuwei Lin. She remarks that the pragmatic attitude of hackers has facilitated a hybrid innovation model that mixes community and for-profit ventures (Lin, 2006). It could be said, then, that the very fuzziness of their ‘boundary object’, or, to put it differently, their lack of a coherent, political analysis, has allowed a large, heterogeneous mass of people to agree on a few key issues, just sufficient for them to collaborate on a FOSS project.

This statement can be illustrated by the TiVo case. The TiVo machine runs GNU/Linux and the company formally abides to the General Public License. The free license has been rendered meaningless, however, since the user is prevented on a hardware level from accessing the source code. Hackers have coined the term ‘tivoisation’ to describe this strategy by firms to follow the letter but break the spirit of the GPL.