Black Beard’s Mouse. From Pirates to Hackers

The literature about piracy flourished just at the end of the Golden Age of pirates (1650-1750). In a mixture of fear and admiration, that literature describes pirates as bloodthirsty champions of liberty, from an anarchic point of view, and of the fight against the official violence, a typical asset of kingdoms and their armies. The hackers' contribution to the conception and birth of the Net is fundamental. But when the web started making the navigation and the electronic purchase of goods easier, the safety of the Net became a big issue, and the hackers gradually became a threat. Similarly to the Golden Century, the room for the hackers is shrinking and their work criminalized. My paper will focus on the use of the word “pirate” and the world of “piracy” to identify who the hackers are and in what their work consists. Why have we assimilated the hackers' work (i.e. opening, looking, learning, adapting, and sharing) to pirate activities? Why in the ‘70s did the hackers themselves identify their work as pirate? What remains of the libertarian ideology? Is there any sort of hackers’ ideology nowadays? Is the battle toward a new concept of intellectual property the way to finally embody the communitarian revolution of the internet? Or is it simply a way to standardize, and so to defuse, the potential revolution of the Net?