# Piracy Manifesto

News from a future newspaper: *“A man was stopped yesterday at the border of Italy and France, his computer was scanned and pirated material was found, mostly Adobe software and songs by Beatles. The man was arrested at the spot”*

From a poem to a drug, from an piece of software to a music record and from a film to a book, everything that’s famous and profitable, owns much of its economic value to the manipulation of the Multitudes. People haven’t asked to know what the Coca-Cola logo looks like, neither have they asked for the melody of “Like a Virgin”. Education, Media and Propaganda teach all that the hard way; by either hammering it on our brains or by speculating over our thirst, our hunger, our need for communication and fun and most of all, over our loneliness and despair. In the days of Internet, what can be copied can be also shared. When it comes to content, we can give everything to everyone at once.

Around this realization, a new social class is awakening. This is not a working class but a class of Producers. Producers are pirates and hackers by default; they recycle the images, the sounds and the concepts of the World. Some of it they invent but most they borrow from others.

Because information occupies a physical part of our bodies, because it is literary “installed” on our brain and can’t be erased at wish, people have the right to own what is projected on them: They have the right to own themselves! Because this is a global World based on inequality and profit, because the contents of a song, a movie or a book are points of advantage in a vicious fight for survival, any global citizen has the moral right to appropriate a digital copy of a song, a movie or a book. Because software is an international language, the secrets of the World are now written in Adobe and Microsoft: we should try hack them. Finally, because poverty is the field of experimentation for all global medicine, no patents should apply.

Today, every man with a computer is a Producer and a Pirate. We all live in the Internet, this is our new country, the only territory that makes sense to defend and protect . The land of the Internet is one of information. Men should be able to use this land freely, corporations should pay for use - a company is definitely not a person.

Internet is now producing “Internets”, situations that exist not only online but also in real space, governed by what is happening online. This is the time for the foundation of an global Movement of Piracy. The freedom of infringing copyright, the freedom of sharing information and drugs: these are our new “Commons”. They are Global Rights and as such, Authorities will not allow them without a battle. But this will be a strange battle because this is the first time the Multitudes disrespect the Law instinctively and on a global scale.

Today, an army of teenagers is copying, the adults are copying and even the senior citizens, people from the Left and from the Right are copying. Everyone with a computer is copying something; like a novel Goddess Athena, Information wants to break free from the head of Technology and it assists us on our enterprise.

Pirates of the Internet Unite!

Miltos Manetas, 2009

