Once upon a time a pirate was “a seafaring robber attacking other ships", a sword between his teeth and a skull and cross bones flying from the masthead, the scourge of honest travelers everywhere. Pirates are the stuff of myth, the hoarders of mysterious charts and buried treasures, Jamaica Rum, diamonds and pearls. Captains Kidd and Morgan stride across our imaginations and into our hearts, walking the deck, raising the flag and sacking ships all along the Spanish Main.

No one knows whether John Henry ever lived. People’s heroes like Robin Hood, Captain Swing or Joe Hill have a way of remaining shadowy despite the enormous amount of research focussed on them. Some, of course, definitely did live. Hill did – Joseph Hilstrom, Swedish longshoreman and Wobbly, who probably wasn’t as lily white as labour myth paints him. Others probably didn’t live at all. John Henry may have. If so he was black, born into slavery, maybe in Alabama, and he took on the new technology of his day, the steam drill.

Daniel James interviews two of the developers working on DSSI, a free software standard for virtual, synthesised instruments

Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said that "all art is theft". The idea may or may not be controversial, but the intention is clear. The creative process, which relies on the evolution of techniques, observation and criticism, is an assimilation of all that has gone before, and all creativity, whether artistic, technological or scientific, walks a thin line between innovation and originality, plagiarism and parody.

In the year 2002 David Bowie told the New York Times: "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing".

"Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened" - Jean Baudrillard

Not A Radio...
Not A Phonograph...
Not Like Anything You Have Ever Heard...

If, as Randall Packer, artist and theorist, argues, contemporary multimedia work expresses Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art), then Free Software coder-artists are definitely masters of this form.

Hackers have always been attracted by audio, fascinated on the one hand by the intricacies of compositional structure and on a more granular level, obsessed with how sound itself is created.

I imagine there can be very few people who don’t know where they were and what they were doing when they first saw the film footage of 9/11. In the 1960s, similarly, it was said that everyone could recall their movements at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. The death of Princess Diana was another legendary happening, but without a doubt 9/11 was the most gruesome of such events – the kind which have mythic proportions even before the print dries on the newspaper headlines.