Copy Banksy?, by Daniel Silk on Jul 17, 2008 17:52:22 GMT 1, www.watoday.com.au/news/book-reviews/the-pirates-dilemma/2008/07/14/1215887522804.html

The Pirate's Dilemma
Matt Mason stands up for the "pirate's" right to free speech, says Chris Johnston.

STREET-ART WAS IN THE NEWS recently through Van Thanh Rudd, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's nephew. He had done an apparently bad thing by copying elements of someone else's art in his own.

What happened was that artist Rudd entered a stencil painting in a civic competition in Melbourne but it was deemed too political and was rejected. That's what first got him in the news. But in the wash-up he was accused of committing something that was pretty much seen as more of a crime - using someone else's idea as a springboard for his own.

His piece showed Ronald McDonald holding an Olympic torch standing next to a burning Tibetan monk. The global economy, it said, contributed to human rights abuses - and, yes, it looked and felt similar to a stencil piece called American Influence by renowned British street artist Banksy.

Banksy also used Ronald McDonald but with Mickey Mouse and a Vietnam War napalm victim. The styles - both in that bold street art/stencil/spray can style so familiar in lanes and inner-city walls - were the same. Rudd was deemed guilty. If it was not plagiarism it was certainly unwarranted appropriation.

What the episode proved was that notions such as hacking, remixing and even, by extension, ripping, burning and digital file-sharing, despite their rudimentary position in modern culture, are still grossly misunderstood. The idea of Rudd's piece was to copy and adapt, yet his art (and as such the art and culture of his generation) was dismissed by the mainstream as invalid and adolescent, when the opposites were true.

Matt Mason, a former pirate radio DJ and style magazine editor from London living in New York, writes polemically in favour of this new culture of "sharing" in The Pirate's Dilemma.

The "pirate", he says, is not a criminal or a thief but the guardian of free speech and free exchange of information, ideas and culture.

It is a dilemma that he acknowledges in the title of his book and its many rapidly advancing arguments posed within.

Is it possible to steal culture and get away with it?

Is it, indeed, theft to do so, or is it art?

Is it right or wrong to use peer-to-peer file sharing through the internet to get music for free?

Is street knowledge more valid than conventional wisdom?

Is the hijacking of public space by graffitists and stencillers an affront or a virtue?

Are these things a revolution even worth having?

Worthwhile questions, absolutely. As old ways of making, distributing and marketing art, music and ideas die out and the new ways burn brightly on the fringe, we all can be involved in piracy. Look at how the banned Channel Nine gangster series Underbelly thrived in Victoria, look at the file-sharing Bit(Removed) cult or how the established music industry has stopped fighting online downloads but has instead tried to embrace them.

Mason's book is fascinating in how it connects distant links between, for example, very early NewYork disco, viral marketing, the acid-house movement and culture jamming. All were piracy - with a clear benefit for the culture - in some way.

He thoroughly documents the "punk capitalism" of zeitgeist entrepreneurs such as graffiti writer-turned-clothing designer Mark Ecko, open source Linux operating system developer Linus Torvalds and Wikipedia open content online encyclopedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Mason claims his place in the rise of this culture as a London pirate radio DJ during the acid-house era and then as a renegade magazine editor, recognising and subverting with these new forms. But with that comes a sense of pompousness.

When reading him you get the impression that his will be the

first and last word on the matter and that no other debate will be entered into.

But it will because this is a story that is only starting to make sense.