Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> is an online, open work space to explore the free sharing
of digital content—often condemned as piracy—as the Net’s ultimate art form.
Commissioned by the Acer Digital Art Center [ADAC] in Taiwan for ArtFuture 2002,
<KOP> was designed to include links, objects, ideas, software, commissioned artists’
projects, critical writing and online streaming media events. Hailed as the first international
online exhibition sponsored by Taiwan’s computer giant Acer Group, a pilot
website, <http://kop.adac.com.tw> was launched in December 2001 and presented
with a press conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipai, Taiwan. In
April 2002 the leadership and direction of ADAC changed. At about the same time,
a major anti-piracy initiative was launched in Taiwan. <KOP> became a politically
sensitive issue in Taiwan and the launch was delayed—indefinitely it seemed.
By May, the curatorial and artists’ FTP access to the <KOP> server was denied.
By mid-June, <kop.adac.com.tw> was taken offline. ADAC demanded editorial rights
to artists’ links and requested a change of the title, Kingdom of Piracy. The joint
curatorial team rejected this demand and sought ways of preserving the project
as both a Taiwanese initiative and an international online art project. In the meantime
<KOP> is seeking patronage of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, and
is being premiered at Ars Electronica 2002.

In the emergent information, or immaterial, economy, intellectual property (IP)—
copyrighted content and patented ideas—constitutes the central resource of many
of its biggest industries, from IT to entertainment, pharmaceuticals and biotech.
The definition of intellectual property rights in the digital domain has emerged as
one of the central struggles to shape the culture of the information society.
Less than a decade ago, the Internet promised free and unlimited exchange of digital
cultural goods. In recent years, however, the specter of “piracy” has been replacing
this utopia. In the wake of this shift, a repressive regime is being installed to
clamp down on what is seen as a threat to the information economy. Content industries
employ armies of lawyers to shut down peer-to-peer file sharing networks,
and write laws preventing any and all circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms.
The latter is aimed at bolstering the relatively new approach to enforce
copyright through special software, known as digital rights management systems
(DRMS), which should make the unauthorized copying of ebooks, music and video
files impossible. These systems fundamentally change the nature of ownership.
Culturally important, even essential, notions such as fair use are being eroded in
favor of total control of the owners over the uses of their content.

In this brave new world, the buyer receives a limited license to use a file rather than
“owning” a record, video or book. The balance of power shifts to companies that
hoard big libraries of copyrighted material. These companies, mostly big multinational
conglomerates, have recently been branded as ‘data lords’ because they can
control how we can see, hear, read, and process digital content that we legally own.
The rigid enforcement of intellectual property rights worldwide through patents,
copyright, anti-piracy laws is resisted by a loose but growing alliance of scientists,
researchers, free software and open source developers, artists, lawyers and
teachers. They fear that the barriers for innovation are being set too high by the
data lords. By building digital and legal fences around information, the costs of
access for educational, scientific and artistic institutions and practices are becoming
prohibitive. As a consequence intellectual life and radical innovation are in danger
of being choked in the interest of a few who control how existing information
can be used for the creation of new information.

The purpose of Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> is to consider the law-and-order provisions
surrounding intellectual property in the context of geographical and cultural
borders, and to examine the changes and challenges presented by them to artists
and cultural producers worldwide.

Contrary to frequent claims, intellectual property rights are not universal. They have
no history in Asia, for example. The demonstrative destruction of millions of pirated
CDs and DVDs in China, part of the spectacle of the country’s entry into the
WTO, does not change the fact that much of the Asian continent is still operating
on its own terms. The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the early 21st century
has plunged Taiwan and Asia's electronic supply industries into recession, keeping
the divide between Western and Eastern economies as wide as ever.

The Kingdom of Piracy is everywhere where there is radical innovation: on the fringes
and in the mainstream high-tech economies, from Asia to Eastern Europe to the
data havens of Sealand and hackers’ garages in Silicon Valley. The digital commons
is bathing in millions of MP3s and an endless supply of warez. Codes for
appropriation, cut-and-paste, replication, sampling and remixing have long been
established as artistic practice. <KOP> challenges artists, writers and practitioners
to use these techniques to question, contribute to, analyze and otherwise address
this growing Kingdom. It also asks them to become intimately involved in the processes
of the Kingdom itself, a place in which all productions are part of an innately
collaborative, derivative and intimately interconnected environment of intellectual
‘properties.’

Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> invites allied crews of hackers (in the sense of Eric S.
Raymond: “A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems
and how to stretch their capabilities”) and artists to plug into the supply lines of
digital abundance. The <KOP> site is an active public sphere for global file-shareing,
de/scrambling and digital culture jamming. Commissioned works are engaged
in artistic acts of “piracy” as a strategy for intellectual discourse and poetic intervention,
but not as any endorsement of piracy as a business model.

The Right to Copy: Local study on piracy as an art form
Whiteg Weng
www.elixus.org

As all-encompassing as the idea of intellectual property and copyright is today,
the mis-coinage “piracy” has wide application on the Internet beyond those of
w4r3z d00dz, key generators and bootleg distributions. Music soundtracks, HTML
source code, and 2-D graphics are all subjects to low-cost duplication efforts.
This study takes a local perspective to focus on the positive effects of uncontrolled
duplication both on industrial growth and cultural identification; this mentality
was arguably the core reason for the so-called “Taiwan Miracle,” which heavily
depends on IP-free materials in the Commons.
Highlighting the most influential events of the past 10 years, we provide a chronology
of the mass movement of duplication and distribution on various media, and
try to shed some light on today’s dilemma of striking a balance between pleasing
foreign content holders and fostering development of local culture. Is the right to
copy an exclusive privilege of content suppliers? What are the positions of various
participants in this struggle? Is such a vendetta absolutely unavoidable?
(writing project)

stealth waltz
Mukul Patel & Manu Luksch
www.ambienttv.net

The Corporation Inc

Announcement to stakeholders: Heritage License Agreement
Following the highly successful appropriation of bio- and ecoknowledge
and techniques through patent legislation, The Corporation
today announces the extension of its reach to the regulation
of folkloric production—in particular, music. Folklore encodes traditional
wisdom that rightfully belongs to everyone. The current inheritors of these forms
do not have the means to adequately preserve or share them. The Corporation,
with the support of a consortium of publishing companies, will safeguard this global
cultural heritage, develop efficient distribution mechanisms, and conduct an archaeology
of the traditional wisdom encoded in folklore through the Heritage License
Agreement (HLA). The HLA is effective immediately. Only instrumental electronic
music in 2/2 time (binary beats) is exempt from the Heritage License, and may be
distributed and consumed without reference to an agent of the HLA.
The Corporation will be the exclusive licensing agent for traditional music production
and distribution. As a valued stakeholder, you are assured of high rewards.
Ambient Information Systems Ltd./ For Immediate Release
Ambient Information Systems Ltd. is proud to launch the first fully vetted and
ratified HLA-free 2/2 server (www.ambienttv.net/2002/2). DOWNLOAD FOR FREE
(limited time offer). Our first license-free 2/2 track, Stealth Waltz by Electroglo-
Bodywerkz (Manu & Mukul). Hidden inside one simple rhythm loop (in time sig. of
4) is another loop. When the 2 loops are played together, a waltz is heard—the
stealth waltz. AIS: For all your contemporary musical needs. Stay safe, stay legal!

Low_Level_All_Stars
BEIGE vs. RSG
http://rhizome.org/Low_Level_All_Stars/

Video game culture has long relied on “crackers,” the fearless geeks who remove a
game’s copy protection through brute force. Crackers often leave behind modified startup
screens as evidence of their trade. This special cracker graffiti both documents the
intrusion and provides a platform to showcase the cracker’s skills. “Low Level All Stars”
showcases the best cracker tags selected from over 1,000 games available for the commodore
64 computer. All cracker tags have been re-cracked by beige and RSG and
extracted as stand-alone commodore animations. You may watch a video clip documenting
each piece, or view still images. ROMs will be available soon from this site. All
documentation was made directly from the C64 with no computer emulation.

The File That Wouldn’t Leave
0100101110101101.org
www.0100101110101101.ORG

Satanism, Pedophilia, Cyber Inquisition and Cultural
Terrorism in the amazing story of “The File
That Wouldn’t Leave”
You won’t believe it!

On the 4th of March 2002, 0100101110101101.ORG is forced to immediately erase from its server the file containing Luther Blissett’s book Lasciate che i bimbi (“Let The Children. Paedophilia as a pretext for a witch hunt”). The server hosts the (un)complete archive of the Luther Blissett Project 1994 – 2000 (www.LutherBlissett.net). The imposition comes from the international
Internet provider PSInet, with the threat of cutting 0100101110101101. ORG’s connectivity. The
excuse is that the content of the book is “illegal and defamatory and relating to paedophilia.” The named book analyses instead how the creation of emergencies becomes a way to establish more restrictive laws and censorship, both in the real world and on the Internet. The book comes to the conclusion that the pedophilia phenomenon has been amplified and magnified resulting in a repressive crusade towards all individual liberties.

The File That Wouldn’t Leave is the story of a case of subtle censorship obtained
trough the provider’s Net Abuse Policies, that allows it to impose the removal from
a website of any material considered defamatory, obscene, pornographic, pedophile
or simply inconvenient. The pyramid-like Internet connectivity system allows any server,
by simply sending an email message, to start a chain reaction of removing requests
that, threatening to cut the connectivity, starts from the upper level server downwards,
to reach any single website that hosts the named material. Whereas no server is supposed
to verify the truth of the accusation, any server has the right of imposing the
removal to the lower ones. The File That Wouldn’t Leave shows how censorship develops
and where it can lead.

injunction generator
ubermorgen.com
www.ubermorgen.com

The injunction generator offers all Internet users a platform to generate court orders
and automatically send them to the respective registrars, domain-name holders
and journalists. You can issue as many court orders as you wish and bring down
as many domains as you want. The platform will constantly monitor the targeted
urls and send out alerts to all involved parties as soon as the target-site dns is
down. Chaos in all cases, it does not matter whether the registrar actually decides
to take the domain down or not, chaos is guaranteed in any case (and as we all
know, certain downtimes for web-servers are usual, so our alerts will generate some
attention to this fact). So we wish you a pleasant “ZEITGEISTschiffeversenken” game
with our non-territorial digital legal art.

Global Village Health Manual v.1
Raqs Media Collective + Joy Chatterjee
www.sarai.net

Work in the Age of Virtual Reproduction

This work wants you to suspend conventional notions of authorship while you interact
with it. Just as the artisans of the popular prints of the last two centuries often used
images and motifs from the visual universe around them, so too have we gathered materials
from the World Wide Web to constitute the different layers of this work.
This is as much to bring to public attention the inherent extensibility and reproducible
nature of artwork in the digital domain, as it is to reclaim the knowledge-sharing imperative
of early popular printmaking. This is why we have chosen the cover of a manual,
a primer of public health, as our point of reference. In the late nineteenth century,
printmaking entered the public imagination as a cheap, accessible and popular
means of producing and circulating pictures, stories, information and rumor. This was
a culture that eluded censors and skirted copyright. Today, a hundred years later, a
cluster of technologies centered on the computer and the Internet has made possible
the birth of a new folklore of images and ideas, which, like its print ancestor, is
also busy eluding censors and skirting copyright.
This work wants you to bridge the distance between the data stream of the present
and the fading imprint of the recent past. It asks that you look through yesterday’s
web of images at the bitmap of where you are today.

Resource Hanger +
doubleNegatives
www.d-xx.com

ResourceHanger+ (RH+) makes objects of web sites from the inputted keyword or URL, and offers the interface which carries out the hybrid. It supports basic cycles of all creative acts such as: copy . improvement . copy … as the process will be further repeated. The code by
JAVA of RH+ itself is also open for improvement.

I love you, world
p.RT
www.cyberrex.org/p.rt

I want to make a piece of poetry lost in the net; with sudden cuts, minimal and
cold, baroque and lonely, mixing CNN with flowers, inviting Christiane Amanpour
to write few sentences, code and information, from haven to earth. The World Data
is hacked and accessible, why should we lose time discussing Entertainment Data
piracy? I want to explore sense of precise solitude in the Kingdom. (V.R.)

explorer 98 game
EASTWOOD – Real Time Strategy Group
http://explorer98.net

explorer 98 is a net game, which is based on two inseparable parts of today’s industry
of fun: corporations that make computer games, and platforms—operative systems on which games have been played. The game explorer 98 is a perverse convergence of the largest software corporation, Microsoft, and one of the biggest studios for RTS (real-time strategy) games, Westwood Studio. explorer 98 is a RTS game but also includes several other genre elements of contemporary computer games as adventures or arcades. explorer 98 uses as its game map snapshots (print screens) from Windows explorer 98 browser that is a constitutive part of the Windows 98 operating system. Units in the game are units from Westwood’s game from the Command & Conquer Series: Tiberian Sun. Symbolically, this game is played inside
the very core of the Microsoft empire, inside Windows Explorer, the ultimate search
engine in Windows’ operating system. There is only one campaign. The player is
always on the side of Microsoft; he/she must choose to be a hero of the Microsoft
Windows empire against evil terrorists. There is no alternative.

Everything, from the explorer map to the units is cut/pasted and then included in
the game. All software is illegal/pirate (Windows98, Westwood’s Tiberian Sun), and
it was bought on the Novi Sad black market.

i_Biology Patent Engine(i-BPE)
Diane Ludin
www.thing.net/~diane/artindex/dlartrez.html

¡°A patent is a type of property right. It gives the patent holder the right, for a limited
time, to exclude others from making, using, offering to sell, selling, or importing into
the United States the subject matter that is within the scope of protection granted
by the patent.¡±.U.S. Patent Office

i-BPE is an open gene patent machine.
i-BPE is an open gene project.
i-BPE is a counter-market-objectivity tool.
i-BPE is a patent the patent action.
i-BPE agents will offer trans-corporate DNA play, for non-governmental ownership.
i-BPE gene patents will return bio-rights to non-governmental, cultural agents for revision.

Top 100 Net Blockers
Dragan Espenschied, Alvar Freude
http://a-blast.org/~drx/
http://alvar.a-blast.org/

The Internet is the single most powerful medium for
free expression and speech in history. This freedom
is endangered by many initiatives that are trying to
block access to content for certain audiences: for
example, the inhabitants of a whole state. State agencies promote restricted access
and impose filtering policies on ISPs to ¡°protect¡± Internet users from pornography,
racism, crime and every other non-valid content. Intelligence services want to read
emails, monitor each Internet user and a lot more. ODEM.org aims to add a new view
to the discussion by presenting an off-the-shelf information blocking, filtering,
manipulating and spying-out solution called Omni Cleaner that:
. easily handles the amount of traffic a typical provider has to deal with
. can be controlled by a centralized agency.for example, a possible future
German Ministry of Internet Censorship,
. offers all the nasty features a police state would like to have in a
comfortable interface that gives people with no Internet experience (like the
typical politician) the possibility to control all net traffic
. can also keep encrypted websites under surveillance
. is able to forward arbitrary emails over a secure connection to a centralized
agency
. offers the possibility to change the content of every affected web page:
partially or completely
Purchase Omni Cleaner and finally live in a beautiful world! (price negotiable)

From Underground to Mainstream
Felix Stalder
http://felix.openflows.org

As the Internet exploded into a mass medium in the mid-1990s, underground culture
that had contributed significantly to the creation of cyberspace exploded with
it. This was not the first time that the underground burst out of its niche, but this
time, things were different. By having full access to highly efficient means of production
and distribution, the underground was no longer restricted to a few clubs
in global cities, some galleries in Paris, London, and NYC, specialized book stores,
or computer labs at universities. Underground acquired overnight the global reach
of the mainstream. On a structural level, the distinction between the two was disappearing
rapidly. Nothing symbolized this better than Napster. Free sharing of
music, simply for the joy of being part of a peer group, could now rival the industry¡¯s
own distribution channels in terms of efficiency.
As a consequence, the open model of underground culture (defamed as piracy)
has come into full confrontation with the closed model of the mainstream.
(writing project)

Warriors of Perception:
Search and Manifest
(A Freenet Game)
Agnese Trocchi
http://candida.kyuzz.org

SOME UNIVERSE for heike, dragan and your browser
Olia Lialina
http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html

PiraPort
The elixir Initiative
(Autrijus Tang & Ilya Eric Lee)
www.elixus.org

HIGH BALL
exonemo
www.exonemo.com

Distributed Media . Digital Abundance:
Property Decay in C21
J.J. King
www.jamie.com
(writing project)

co-curators: Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch, Yukiko Shikata
project producer: Ray Wang. project coordinator: Mia Chen
www.aec.at/kop
http://211.73.224.150/