“There is no justice in following unjust laws.

It is time to come into the light

and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this
private theft of public culture”

The belief that the Internet is a neutral space without ideological

problematics and social issues, is a naivity, a very dangerous one. Today, the
Internet is just the opposite, is a space of a constant struggle between forces that
promote a new order and forces that fight to maintain the established power just
the way it is.

The thing is that the Internet is something substantially different from the
real world. It has its own rules, its own grammar. Despite all this, they are closely
interrelated, especially when it comes to commercial exchanges.

From these relationships the main problem emerges. What in the real
world has to be kept in a physical format, like a cd or dvd, in order to be sold, on
the Internet it has to be offered in a digital format, which means as a pure datum.
This is the main feature of Internet grammar, all its components are pure data, in
consequence they can be modified and transformed in sth entarily new,
downloaded, remixed and pirated.

Piracy is the capital sin on the Internet. It moves more political forces
around the world than the fight against child pornography, drug traffiking, sexual
harassment and many others crimes committed on line. This is because it affects
economic interests of very powerful industries, the cultural industries, those that
during long periods of time have been accumulating rights and profits over the
work of generations of artists, musicians and writers, and, principally, generating
and naturalazing the culture they need to keep gaining multimillionarie profits.

Internet changed the equation radically. It has given to anyone the

possibility of generating culture by taking data and transforming them, which is
the regular mechanism to create an artistic work. Quote, irony, parody,
intertextuality, procedures susppected of plagiarism, are the elements thath boost
the dialogue between gendres, art Works and artists. They make culture,
possible.
 Internet changed the power, took it out from a few hands and made it
available to the public, to everyone. These anarchic qualities of the Internet have
cause the reaction of the industry and the globalized power. Global legal
machinery has been activated to prosecute artists, muisicians, enterprises and
people, in the name of intelectual property laws. Laws that display a obscurantist
content, a content that is not suitable to this digital era.

Many Internet entrepreneurs have been arrested. Kim Dotcom, for

example, the creator of Megaupload, which was an online Company that
functioned providing online services related to storage and viewing. After his
detention, the FBI confiscated the web servers and eliminated billions and billions
of files that dissapeared without the discrimination of their origins: public, private,
legal or ilegal. The event was compared with the burning of Alexandria Library
because of the massiveness of the lost files.

Peter Sunde, Fredrick Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, creators of The Pirate Bay,
suffered the same fate and last year they were arrested.

They prosecuted hacktivist like Julien Assagne who made public classified
information of the US army and created Wikileaks, a platform were is possible to
publish and share that kind of secret files.

The most emblematic example of this struggle is the fierce prosecution

against Aaron Swartz, who was a programmer and hacktivist for the freedom on
the Internet. He advocated for the realese of all the scientific and cultural heritage
kept in private date bases and for making these knowledge accesible to the
human kind. In this search he had access to the library of the MIT and
downloaded thousands of academic files just for sharing them on the net.

Because of this crime he faced the possibility of been sentenced to fifty

years in prison. They wanted to set an example with his case, and they did it.
Aaron at the age of 26, committed suicide while he was waiting to be judged. In
this way, we lost one of the most brilliant and generous minds of our times.

Corporations that manage the economy, govertments and laws in the real
world cannot extend their control over the virtual world. It woud mean the
reduplication of their injustices, their unfare distribution of whealth, their lies and
obscurantism. The cultural industry and copyright cannot ensure the existence of
culture, art and science. They are not necessary. Their attempts to criminalize
the fight for liberty of information and knowledge will be in vain, because the
nature of knowledge demands to be shared, thought, released in order to be alive,
ripped from the ambitious hands of the powerful to benefit the humanity.