Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za P2P, intellectual property and hip-hop subversion Adam Haupt Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za P2P, intellectual property and hip-hop subversion Adam Haupt Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Published by HSRC Press Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpress.ac.za First published 2008 ISBN 978-0-7969-2209-0 © 2008 Human Sciences Research Council The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’) or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the author. In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to the Council. Copyedited by Jacquie Withers Typeset by Stacey Gibson Cover design by Farm Design Print management by comPress Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Tel: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax: +27 (0) 21 701 7302 www.oneworldbooks.com Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS) Tel: +44 (0) 20 7240 0856; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7379 0609 www.eurospanbookstore.com Distributed in North America by Independent Publishers Group (IPG) Call toll-free: (800) 888 4741; Fax: +1 (312) 337 5985 www.ipgbook.com Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Foreword vii Acknowledgements x Abbreviations xii Introduction xv 1 Reading Empire 1 Theorising Empire 2 The power of the multitude 21 Critiques of Empire 28 The case for the power of the multitude 31 Conclusion: multitude, media and culture 34 2 Hollywood and subversion in the age of Empire 38 The Matrix as its own pure simulacrum 41 Empire, culture and agency in The Matrix 51 Rage Against the Machine and thematic depth in The Matrix 55 Rage Against the Machine and Zapatismo 58 Conclusion: capturing globalisation 65 3 The technology of subversion 66 Interpreting the Statute of Anne 68 The politics of digital sampling in hip-hop 72 Digital sampling, ownership and recuperation 76 The digital continuum: 3 technology 82 Empire and the failure of democracy 85 Conclusion: no closure here 97 Contents Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 4 Enclosure of the commons and the erosion of democracy 100 Enclosure of the commons 102 The Internet as an information commons 104 Open source, 2 and the culture of tinkering 106 Enclosing the information commons 112 Reclaiming the commons: open source and Creative Commons 118 Culture jamming and free speech: citizens versus corporations 127 Conclusion: towards the common 139 5 Hip-hop, gender and co-option in the age of Empire 142 Race, gender and the commodification of hip-hop 143 ‘Conscious’ hip-hop’s continued appeal 156 Godessa in dialogue with Empire 166 Immortal Technique in dialogue with Empire 174 Conclusion: global aliations 178 6 Hip-hop, counterpublics and noise in post-apartheid South Africa 183 Noise from and Black Noise 184 Noise from younger s 192 Noise and subaltern counterpublics 203 Democracy, the nation-state and Empire 206 Conclusion: common struggles 215 Conclusion 216 Notes 221 References 238 Interviews 251 Index 252 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za vii You wouldn’t steal a culture* Peer-to-peer (2) file-sharing is stealing! How does one respond to such an ill-founded claim? One response is to carefully explain the fallacies involved. Copyright infringement, the intended but unmentioned target of the claim, is not regarded as theft by the law but instead as a transgression of a statutory provision, which is a criminal oence only in certain circumstances. P2 file-sharing is simply a technology; to confuse it with copyright infringement and stealing appears to be a category mistake stemming from an over-literal reliance on the metaphor of ‘intellectual property’. However, uncovering these fallacies shouldn’t distract from uncovering the fault lines to which they point, and which Stealing Empire so intriguingly lays bare. The idea that copyright, a monopolistic legal right granted by legislation, is equivalent to a moveable material object such as a car that can be used by only one or a few people at a time and can thus be ‘stolen’, is more than confusion about the nature of rights in legal theory. Sustained conflation of the popular usage of the term ‘property’ with technical references to intangible economic interests and statutorily constructed legal rights evidences a rhetorical campaign. P2 file-sharing is a communications technology designed to facilitate communication between computers; communication that is ‘many-to-many’, multidirectional, and favouring unrestricted, self-organising dialogues. The values encoded within that technology are radically dierent from those inherent in the ‘one-to-many’ monologue that characterises the dated technologies of broadcasting and associated 20 th century mass media. Hostility from those invested in mass media models of technologies, which configure communication very dierently, is unsurprising. Foreword Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za viii Stealing Empire, while briefly uncovering such fallacies, does not become entangled in them. Instead the book rigorously interrogates the global cultural domination of a small group of multinational corporations based in the north, and explains how that cultural domination rests on the control of the means of cultural production, especially through the manipulation and extension of intellectual property laws and media concentration. Global youth culture is an important domain in which appropriation, resistance, co-option and conscientisation shape culture as a site of struggle over the production of identity. Sampling, file-sharing and remix genres have found fertile ground in this domain, as have the appropriation and co-option of music, art and film produced by subaltern communities. In a fine analysis of cultural production in post-apartheid South Africa, the author shows how its position within a dominant global discourse on race and gender tends to reinforce these constructs in ways parallel to the dichotomising processes of apartheid. The linkages between intellectual property law, cultural dominance, globalisation and local conditions are carefully traced. Not content with exposing the structure of hegemony, Haupt engages in a penetrating investigation of the multiple strategies of subaltern resistance to the global empire of cultural hegemony. Hip-hop, as music, performance art and protest began with the (re)appropriation of music sprung from African rhythms and beats. The co-option of hip-hop artists by the recording industry is resisted by those who consciously position their art as community work and art. Stealing Empire points out that 2 file- sharing constitutes a significant rejection of the enclosure of contemporary culture and thus is another form of resistance. The ‘creative commons’ of music, visuals and writing which can be creatively reworked oers an alternative vision of creativity in which sharing rather than exclusion is the central process. These forms of resistance to the cultural hegemony of late capitalism are ambivalent, susceptible to appropriation, but oer the possibility of challenge. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za ix Stealing Empire is a fascinating critique of cultural production linking the youth culture of post-apartheid South African townships to the struggle for the soul of hip-hop. Andrew Rens Intellectual Property Fellow Shuttleworth Foundation Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Thanks to Jane Stadler for her commitment to this project. I would like to thank Julian Jonker, Gary Stewart, Dan Moshenberg, Solly Leeman, Julien Hofman, Henning Snyman, Ian Glenn, Natasha Distiller, Edgar Pieterse, Frank Meintjies, Soraya Abdulatief, Ermien van Pletzen, Anne Short, Kelwyn Sole and Nazima Rassool for their intellectual engagement and for commenting on drafts of my chapters. I would also like to thank the following artists and activists for allowing me to engage with their work and for entering into continued discussions with me: Shaheen Ariefdien, Nazli Abrahams, Ready D, Shamiel Adams, Shameema Williams, Burni Amansure, Eloise Jones, Marlon Burgess, Ed Camngca, Theo Camngca, Wanda Mxosana, Coslyn Schippers, Brad Brockman, Grenville Williams and Emile Jansen. Thanks also to Creative Commons South Africa for making it possible for me to attend the conference Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons in 2005. Chapters 3, 5 and 6 are extended revisions of previously published work. I thank the following for their kind permission to include them in this book: Peter Lang Publishing, New York, for Chapter 3 which was originally published in a shorter form as ‘The technology of subversion: From sampling in hip-hop to the 3 revolution’ in MD Ayers (Ed.) Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture, New York: Peter Lang, 2006; Agenda, Heinemann South Africa and the Isandla Institute for Chapter 5, which was first published as ‘Hip-hop, gender and agency in the age of Empire’ in Agenda 57 (2003): 21–29; and reworked as ‘Hip-hop in the age of Empire: Cape Flats style’ in E Pieterse and Acknowledgements x Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za [...]... that Empire is characterised as a stealing Empire – stealing functions as a descriptive term in this context Some of the more subversive practices described in this book – whether through P2P networks, sampling, hacking or the production of lyrics and poetry – point to attempts at stealing or reappropriating these expressions, cultural products or practices from Empire or dominant global corporate... be an ‘outside’ to power in Empire, and that Empire s operation is incredibly pervasive Hardt and Negri argue that ‘the construction of Empire, and the globalization of economic and cultural relationships, means that the virtual center of Empire can be attacked from any point’ (2000: 59) This enables consideration of the kinds of agency that are possible in the context of Empire – a key objective of... about Empire and the power of the multitude could be applied to an analysis of culture, law, technology and counter-discursive political voices Theorising Empire Empire was written in the context of growing challenges to the iniquities that were brought about by globalisation, which Joseph Stiglitz deines as the ‘removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national 2 Stealing empire. .. deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of their own by attempting to harness globalisation or ‘steal Empire in order to achieve social justice as well as more representative democracies The notion of stealing Empire or ‘capturing globalisation’ is discussed in Chapter 1, which ofers an elucidation of the concept of Empire and begins to consider the possibilities for agency in the context of global capitalism... in Empire; later chapters explore P2P, sampling in hip-hop, open source software, Creative Commons licences, culture jamming and hip-hop activism xxiv Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za READING EMPIRE Michael hardt and antonio Negri’s Empire (2000) provides a good point of entry into a discussion of global capitalism and modes of resistance to the capitalist system Hardt and Negri use the term Empire ... that the term empire in the work of Hardt and Negri is misleading and that the authors’ ‘overemphasis on the transcendence of place under globalization leads them to underemphasize the degree to which empire, in the Roman sense, is still very much an available option for attempting to secure hegemony and hence for protecting their empire from the threat posed by the multitude’ (2003: 878) Empire was... the operation of this form of power (Hardt & Negri 2000: 58–59) Hardt and Negri suggest that Empire is vulnerable ‘from any point’ and that revolutionary possibilities can only take the form of a ‘constituent counterpower that emerges from within Empire (2000: 59) Therefore the very means that consolidate Empire s decentralised power can be used to challenge it from within its operation It is this... counter-hegemonic interpretations from the ilm or the soundtrack In this sense, it is possible to conceive of the possibility of issuing challenges to Empire by making use of the same strategies that extend its power xix Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Key foci of Stealing Empire include corporate uses of digital music technology, the Internet, the law, and approaches to computer programs Chapter 3 explores... mechanisms employed by colonial powers I consider the possibilities of responding to Empire and resisting corporate globalisation through xv Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za strategies that employ some of the same decentralised, network-based techniques that beneit global corporate entities As a whole, Stealing Empire crosses a few disciplinary boundaries I create links between work produced by... Hardt contends that the proletariat ‘comes into being 4 Stealing empire Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za through capital, and it only lives in a kind of intimate and mutual relation with capital’ (Hardt, Smith & Minardi 2004) This interpretation of Marx seems to be a key motivation for Hardt and Negri’s belief that it is possible to counter Empire from within Hardt links this to Deleuze and Guattari’s . Abbreviations xii Introduction xv 1 Reading Empire 1 Theorising Empire 2 The power of the multitude 21 Critiques of Empire 28 The case for the power of. challenges to Empire by making use of the same strategies that extend its power. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za xx Key foci of Stealing Empire include