Free The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism by Rodolphe Durand, Jean-Philippe Vergne Page A

categorically refused to broadcast what it considered to be anarchistic music. Even as they complained about not receiving royalties, record companies still managed to send out previews of their new records so that listeners could get to know them. These companies were the unofficial instigators of a vast pirate enterprise that boosted both their reputation and sales, even as they fought alongside the government and the BBC. The BBC also found itself caught in the web of its own antipirate talk: in order to protect their sales, the record companies authorized the BBC to broadcast only twenty-two hours of musical programming per week, while the majority of pirate stations were playing upwards of ten hours of rock and roll each day.
    Successive waves of capitalist expansion into new territories create a series of gray areas from where pirate organizations can diffuse and defend their public cause. In their own quest for political or economic advantage, organizations of the milieu sometimes compromise by adopting the pirate way behind the scenes while publicly opposing it (e.g., think of record labels siding with the BBC regarding copyright issues while making sure that their latest releases are broadcast on pirate radio stations). Record labels put the BBC in a corner and participated in its commoditization, ending its monopoly and the direct control of the sovereign over its programs. Absent pirate radio, the entertainment and media industries could have taken a very different path, which ironically could have prevented them from dominating the sphere of cultural production throughout the twentieth century—at least until the rise of cyberspace in the late 1990s.

Chapter Nine
     
    THE PIRATE ORGANIZATION AND THE MONOPOLIST
     
Traditionally, the granting of a trade monopoly … is a power that the sovereign exercises over his territory, its citizens, a power that is then extended to the territory and the colonized people. The very concept of law is closely linked to that of territoriality .
     
—Soderberg, Hacking Capitalism
     
To eliminate piracy on a larger scale, however, trade monopoly had to be given up altogether .
     
—Pérotin-Dumon, The Pirate and the Emperor
     
    To exploit the resources of a new territory, states define which organizations can operate, embody, and convey the norms of exchange as well as determine property rights, the nature of risks, and the sharing of returns on investment. Historically, monopolies bring together capitalist territorialization with the normalization of trade. Often, monopolistic organizations are granted sovereign charters by the state in order to make normalization possible. The East India Companies, for example, were chartered companies, and so was the BBC. Both helped sovereigns to normalize partially uncharted territories.
    On the other hand, the pirate organization champions a public cause in opposition to the sovereign’s norms. It is a renegade form of economic action from within the limits of capitalism itself. It disputes the basic assumptions of capitalism—levying of tax and capturing of profits—the tenets that characterize the monopoly state and its offshoot, the oligopoly state. The pirate organization claims other rights for economic exploitation, without “legally” defining a territory or establishing property rights.
    Route to the Indies, Commercial Monopoly, and the Birth of Capitalism
     
    In 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal around the Cape of Good Hope and opened the route to the East Indies. Over the next fifteen years, the Portuguese court sent a series of armed armadas to the Indies in order to eliminate Muslim trade throughout the area and prepare the ground for the Portuguese arrival. This period marked the beginning of the reign of a new form of economic organization: between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern European state established the trade monopoly as a fulcrum for capitalistic expansion. In particular, the