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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1999 Steal a leaf from the pirate's book IN the Sixties commercial radio was illegal in Britain and numerous pirate radio ships were anchored offshore, broadcasting pop music. The popularity of this freedom ultimately resulted in our present regime of local radio stations serving individual communities. During the same era a growing number of people were using illegal Citizen's Band radios. Again, it was the pirates who ultimately forced a change in the regulatory regime, and now we have access to the airwaves. It seems to me that among the many things a nation should write into its constitution is a paragraph concerned with the basic human right to communicate by whatever means available from the past, present and future. Looking to history, it has only been the most dictatorial of regimes, and the very worst excesses of the controlist mentality, that have tried to constrain the basic human need and right to communicate. New technologies always bring new possibilities, freedoms and responsibilities. Only a few years ago it became clear that computers would trade on the Internet without human intervention, and evolving tax avoidance schemes might see servers on satellites, beyond the reach of the nation state. After all, it is common practice to use offshore companies to avoid tax, so why not satellites for Internet? Today several groups are looking to employ disused oil tankers equipped with satellite dishes to be positioned in international waters in the same way pirate radio stations operated in the Sixties. Soon after the Second World War a radio channel-hopping technique was developed to avoid the detection and decoding of military signals. This required that the transmitting and receiving stations know in advance what frequency/channel and codes would be used, as the transmitter frequency is changed continually during the message. On the Internet we now have an interesting parallel, with dynamic URLs. This new development presents another interesting prospect, but this time for questionable operations. Website hopping is ideal for trading pirated information with URLs that hop from one location to another to avoid detection and the possibility of criminal prosecution. Some of these sites contain video and audio material that avoid all royalty payments for the artist and producers. Of course, to track the dynamic URL you have to be an insider, you have to have the knowledge as the hopping may be on an hourly, daily or on a weekly basis. In such an evasive Internet regime nations, producers, individuals and artists will lose revenues and cannot be sustained in large numbers. So a new arrangement is required, with thousands of times more sales at a hundredth of today's prices generating more money and more revenues. It is probably impossible to police websites and no amount of chasing will totally close them down. Moreover, it is a racing certainty that the efforts of industry to watermark, encrypt and distort information on music and video files will be circumvented by one mechanism or another. So, like the Sixties, it might actually be smarter to give up, relax and create a regime where information trading can flourish without any control. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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