Next to "cowboy," the most Potent and popular image of the hacker is that of a pirate. Oceanographic and piracy metaphors are equally as common in cyberculture as ones about lawless frontiers and modem-totin' cowboys and cowgirls. People talk of "surfing the edge," and the "vast oceans of the Internet." Bruce Sterling's near future novel about data piracy was named Islands in the Net. In it, third world countries and anarchist enclaves operate data havens, buying and selling global information through the world's wide
bandwidth computer networks.
Anarchist theorist and rantmeister Hakim Bey penned an essay called "Temporary Autonomous Zones
(or T.A.Z.)" inspired by Sterling's data islands.
Bey sees in the rapidly growing technoiv sphere of our planet the possibilities for a new form of nomadic anarchic culture that might resemble the sea-faring pirate societies of the 18th century. Using all the resources of the global nets, individ-ual cybernauts can come together to form tempo-rary and virtual enclaves. These bands can wreak havoc, throw a party, exchange intelligence, or whatever else they want. Once the deed is done, the party over, the nomadic bands simply disappear back into the dense fabric of cyberspace. While de-cidedly romantic, the TAZ idea is attractive to many hackers and cyberspace residents who daily feel the fluidity of movement and the potential for invisibility offered on "the nets." Of course, let's not kid ourselves, pirates were mainly concerned with stealing things. In cyber-space, piracy becomes a more ambiguous and con-tested can of worms. Are you really taking some-thing if you're simply looking at it or making a copy of it? If you copy copyrighted material - let's say an image - and then alter it significantly, to the point that it is almost unrecognizable, have you violated the copyright? What if you're using it as raw materials in a piece of art, like collage?
What does stealing mean when what is stolen is nothing more than a particular assemblage of electrical im-pulses? I regularly download recognizable audio bytes from networks, process them in a sound edi-tor, and then use them in various audio art projects. Am I stealing? If I publish the work commercially, THEN is it
plagiarism? All of these questions about sampling, copying, cutting, pasting, repurposing, and altering have become the thorny legal and ethical issues of our cybernetic age. Hackerdom is one of the domains that is rapidly fueling the fire.
