[Commons-Law] Hack License

[Keith Hart]

Ram,

Thanks for distributing this article which treats Ken Wark seriously, 
but puts him in his place as just another New York cultural critic.

Reading it reminded me of the anti-hero of my favourite novel, 
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Since I was 17 I have had to live 
with the knowledge that the character in fiction I most identify with, 
Raskolnikov, murdered an old lady for her money just to see if he could 
get away with it. His nemesis is a clever police detective called 
Porphyry, a bit like Sreenivasan in the 2002 Bollywood movie, Company. 
Most of the novel is a cat-and-mouse game between the two of them in 
which Porphyry tries to crack Raskolnikov into making a confession. 
This  not a whodunnit, since we all, including these two, know who did it.

The key scene is one where Porphyry let's his opponent know that he's 
been doing some research and has read an article R. published in a 
student magazine somewhere. he quotes a line that has been burnt on my 
brain eversince I first read it. "Anyone who would do something new must 
be a criminal". Porphyry asks him if he still beleives that. From then 
on Raskolnikov is on the back foot and, of course, he eventually cracks. 
Who wouldn't, with that burden of guilt?

But I knew instinctively what made this guy tick. He was on th eloose, 
between the cracks of society. he was intelligent and he knew the rules 
didn't work for people like him. So why not break a few to find out what 
happened? I felt the same, since when, maybe two? I understood 
instinctively that my mother's rules for eating at table would keep me 
stuck where I didn't want to be for the rest of my life. So I broke 
them. My most famous contribution to learning is that I invented th 
eexpression, 'the informal economy'. Work it out.

What gets me about the Lessig tendency and all the earnest discussion 
about licences is that it's playing by their rules in the name of doing 
something different. Don't people understand that we are up against 
characters who make the 19th century railroad barons and J.D. 
Rockefeller himself look like amateurs? Enough of this. But, as far as I 
am concerned, the word hacker had better retain its criminal meaning or 
we are all lost.

Keith