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article-chemla-confessions-thief.mw (7129B)
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1 .SH chemla
2 Confessions of a thief
3 .
4 .QP
5 Below is the beginning of "Confessions of a Thief" from Laurent
6 Chemla. He founded a major French DNS registrar, but before that,
7 was the first to commit online piracy in France (from a Minitel),
8 and worked on development tools for Atari. The book is published
9 online in French and translated below.
10 .
11 .PP
12 A thief. How else to name one of the first individual in France to
13 procure itself an Internet access? In 1994, borrowing the clothes of
14 a telecommunication expert, that I was not yet, I obtained from an IT
15 staff employee of a parisian University that he let me an access to
16 Internet. In exchange, I brought him help - relatively - to the
17 building of a network devoted to let student work from home.
18 .
19 .PP
20 I then stole, I confess, this first access to a network that remained
21 to me a mostly unexplored land since my last visits in 1992, mediated
22 by obscure manoeuvres of a friend or through piracy.
23 .
24 .PP
25 This theft benefited to me, I could learn to use a tool long before
26 the majority of the IT crowd, gaining an advance that still persist
27 today.
28 .
29 .PP
30 I stole, but I plead good faith. At this epoch nobody around me did
31 understand what it was about. Would it bit a thief to steal something
32 nobody had interest in? This access was to the reach of only a few
33 testing university students, this access that a small IT company could
34 not afford, I stole it, and I am not ashamed.
35 .
36 .PP
37 For my relatives, I am nontheless an "IT janitor". Programmer to a
38 tiny IT company, I always have been passionated by telematic networks.
39 A passion that costed me, in 1986, to be the first to be guilty of
40 piracy in France, pirated from a Minitel, yes, but to each his glory.
41 As there was not yet any law against IT piracy, I have been
42 incriminated for stealing electrical power. All that ended up in an
43 acquittal, but still, here is a decent start for a thief career!
44 .
45 .PP
46 Indeed, how to name differently someone who constituted its
47 professional network by taking part to associations? We have the
48 impression to contribute unpaid for the many, but we mostly get known
49 and, time after time, the clients get attracted by this visibility.
50 Of course anyone whose professional occupation deals with voluntary
51 sector end-up face to its own consciousness. Not unlike, I suppose, a
52 lawyer who gain clients from the excluded folk that he help graciously
53 and daily. I ignore what its consciousness would tell him, but I know
54 mine is not at rest.
55 .
56 .PP
57 Nowadays again, my activities continue to be lucrative out of
58 Internet, at the time of Nasdaq's fall. How can one earn while
59 everyone loose, if not by cheating?
60 .
61 .PP
62 A thief is on that use to its profit else's good. To me, Internet is
63 a public good and, if serve as commercial gallery for some, it must
64 not limit itself to such a deviation. Internet must first and
65 foremost be the tool that, for the first time in mankind, permitted
66 the freedom of speech, defined as a fundamental human right.
67 .
68 .PP
69 This right, in all its guarantee from our constitutional state, has
70 stayed hypothetical since its proclamation. In France law protects
71 freedom of Speech of syndicates and journalists but no text that
72 permit to the simple citizen to undertake justice, to reach its
73 freedom. What else since, before Internet, this freedom was to the
74 reach of some privilegied? The lawyer protected them because only
75 them needed that protection. Ten years ago, noone would have been
76 able to benefit an as simple, fast and affordable way to expose works,
77 arts or ideas but by vociferating in the street or by climbing the
78 social scale rung by rung to the point of having media's attention.
79 One had to be represented by others with the expression right for
80 themself. Only ersatz. The only freedom that matters is the one
81 available to all and I dont give a damn about those reserved to the
82 mighty or their representatives.
83 .
84 .PP
85 Internet thereby permit to a growing number of citizen to apply their
86 fundamental right to take the parole on the public place. From this
87 point of view, it must be protected such as any other necessary yet
88 fragile resource, such as water we drink everyday. It cannot be
89 reserved to anyone, neither be limited in its usages if not by the
90 common right. No exception legislation must forbide the exercise of
91 freedom of speech and, as soon as possible, states must preserve the
92 common tool that became a public benefit. And as I use a public good
93 to lead my own fights, yet again, I behave as a thief.
94 .
95 .PP
96 I thereby knew the Internet some time before everybody else, still at
97 the age of the Far West, Eldorado, Utopia. At this era, the network
98 was backed by public money (mostly from United States), the life was
99 happier and the electronic sky bluer. We worked all along, among
100 passionated, inventing new computer objects that even Microsoft did
101 ignore, like Linux or the World Wide Web (you know, the three
102 fastidious *w* we have to type in the address of your favorite porn
103 website...) that did not yet exist and that today everybody mistake
104 for the network itself.
105 .
106 .PP
107 We were far from thinking that some day, we would need a plethora of
108 lawyers to organize the network. That some day, we would need
109 interdepartmental comittees to address of the question. That some
110 day, we would have to put black on white the manners not yet named
111 "netiquette" that seemd all so natural to us. Our only desire, share
112 that formidable invention with the most people, make its apology,
113 attract the most numerous of passionated who shared with us their
114 competency, their knowledge and intelligence.
115 .
116 .PP
117 I remember that at this epoch, when I was saying "Internet", my
118 friends looked at me as if coming from another planet. When I
119 transfered a file from a computer from one end of of the world to my
120 own machine - by cabalistic commands typed by hand under an interface
121 working without a mouse pointer - the seasoned IT engineers was
122 assisting to the demonstration as to a bad movie: finding a file was
123 taking hours, reading speeds was worth a sick snail and the file often
124 revealed to be unusable... But while a pal entered in my office, I
125 would show him how by typing a single command line I could share, for
126 a ridiculous price, my work, my knowledge, my files or my data with
127 pure strangers and that could live at the other side of the street as
128 the other side of the world.
129 .
130 .PP
131 Besides from other passionated people, everybody was laughing at me.
132 I could tell them that this thingy would be a revolution for human
133 knowledge, they looked at me in pity and went back to their work.
134 .
135 .PP
136 In the best case, I was told with lucidity "It is a pirate thing.".
137 Some was asking who would that fit, beyond telematic specialists.
138 Other claimed that volontary and free sharing of resources would not
139 have, by definition, any economical future. I was also asked
140 sometimes who would dare to provide such a terrible service. And when
141 I explained them that everything was entirely decentralised, with for
142 only coordination volunteership and good will of all, the same ones
143 was telling me that it could never work at a large scale.
144 .
145 .DS
146 https://www.confessions-voleur.net/
147 .DE