Graziano, Mars & Medak
Learning from #Syllabus
2019
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LEARNING FROM
#SYLLABUS
VALERIA GRAZIANO,
MARCELL MARS,
TOMISLAV MEDAK
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LEARNING FROM #SYLLABUS
VALERIA GRAZIANO, MARCELL MARS, TOMISLAV MEDAK
The syllabus is the manifesto of the 21st century.
—Sean Dockray and Benjamin Forster1
#Syllabus Struggles
In August 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old boy living in Ferguson, Missouri,
was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson. Soon after, as the civil protests denouncing police brutality and institutional racism began to mount across the United
States, Dr. Marcia Chatelain, Associate Professor of History and African American
Studies at Georgetown University, launched an online call urging other academics
and teachers ‘to devote the first day of classes to a conversation about Ferguson’ and ‘to recommend texts, collaborate on conversation starters, and inspire
dialogue about some aspect of the Ferguson crisis.’2 Chatelain did so using the
hashtag #FergusonSyllabus.
Also in August 2014, using the hashtag #gamergate, groups of users on 4Chan,
8Chan, Twitter, and Reddit instigated a misogynistic harassment campaign against
game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, media critic Anita Sarkeesian, as well as
a number of other female and feminist game producers, journalists, and critics. In the
following weeks, The New Inquiry editors and contributors compiled a reading list and
issued a call for suggestions for their ‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’.3
In June 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United
States. In the weeks that followed, he became the presumptive Republican nominee,
and The Chronicle of Higher Education introduced the syllabus ‘Trump 101’.4 Historians N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain found ‘Trump 101’ inadequate, ‘a mock college syllabus […] suffer[ing] from a number of egregious omissions and inaccuracies’,
failing to include ‘contributions of scholars of color and address the critical subjects
of Trump’s racism, sexism, and xenophobia’. They assembled ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’.5
Soon after, in response to a video in which Trump engaged in ‘an extremely lewd
conversation about women’ with TV host Billy Bush, Laura Ciolkowski put together a
‘Rape Culture Syllabus’.6
1
2
3
4
5
6
Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, ‘README.md’, Hyperreadings, 15 February
2018, https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
Marcia Chatelain, ‘Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus’, Dissent Magazine, 28 November 2014,
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus/.
‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’, The New Inquiry, 2 September 2014, https://thenewinquiry.
com/tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
‘Trump 101’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 June 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/
Trump-Syllabus/236824/.
N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’, Public Books, 28 June 2016, https://
www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/.
Laura Ciolkowski, ‘Rape Culture Syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October 2016, https://www.
publicbooks.org/rape-culture-syllabus/.
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In April 2016, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe established the Sacred Stone
Camp and started the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the construction of
which threatened the only water supply at the Standing Rock Reservation. The protest at the site of the pipeline became the largest gathering of native Americans in
the last 100 years and they earned significant international support for their ReZpect
Our Water campaign. As the struggle between protestors and the armed forces unfolded, a group of Indigenous scholars, activists, and supporters of the struggles of
First Nations people and persons of color, gathered under the name the NYC Stands
for Standing Rock Committee, put together #StandingRockSyllabus.7
The list of online syllabi created in response to political struggles has continued to
grow, and at present includes many more examples:
All Monuments Must Fall Syllabus
#Blkwomensyllabus
#BLMSyllabus
#BlackIslamSyllabus
#CharlestonSyllabus
#ColinKaepernickSyllabus
#ImmigrationSyllabus
Puerto Rico Syllabus (#PRSyllabus)
#SayHerNameSyllabus
Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves
Syllabus: Women and Gender Non-Conforming People Writing about Tech
#WakandaSyllabus
What To Do Instead of Calling the Police: A Guide, A Syllabus, A Conversation, A
Process
#YourBaltimoreSyllabus
It would be hard to compile a comprehensive list of all the online syllabi that have
been created by social justice movements in the last five years, especially, but not
exclusively, those initiated in North America in the context of feminist and anti-racist
activism. In what is now a widely spread phenomenon, these political struggles use
social networks and resort to the hashtag template ‘#___Syllabus’ to issue calls for
the bottom-up aggregation of resources necessary for political analysis and pedagogy
centering on their concerns. For this reason, we’ll call this phenomenon ‘#Syllabus’.
During the same years that saw the spread of the #Syllabus phenomenon, university
course syllabi have also been transitioning online, often in a top-down process initiated
by academic institutions, which has seen the syllabus become a contested document
in the midst of increasing casualization of teaching labor, expansion of copyright protections, and technology-driven marketization of education.
In what follows, we retrace the development of the online syllabus in both of these
contexts, to investigate the politics enmeshed in this new media object. Our argument
7
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://
nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
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is that, on the one hand, #Syllabus names the problem of contemporary political culture as pedagogical in nature, while, on the other hand, it also exposes academicized
critical pedagogy and intellectuality as insufficiently political in their relation to lived
social reality. Situating our own stakes as both activists and academics in the present
debate, we explore some ways in which the radical politics of #Syllabus could be supported to grow and develop as an articulation of solidarity between amateur librarians
and radical educators.
#Syllabus in Historical Context: Social Movements and Self-Education
When Professor Chatelain launched her call for #FergusonSyllabus, she was mainly
addressing a community of fellow educators:
I knew Ferguson would be a challenge for teachers: When schools opened across
the country, how were they going to talk about what happened? My idea was simple, but has resonated across the country: Reach out to the educators who use
Twitter. Ask them to commit to talking about Ferguson on the first day of classes.
Suggest a book, an article, a film, a song, a piece of artwork, or an assignment that
speaks to some aspect of Ferguson. Use the hashtag: #FergusonSyllabus.8
Her call had a much greater resonance than she had originally anticipated as it reached
beyond the limits of the academic community. #FergusonSyllabus had both a significant impact in shaping the analysis and the response to the shooting of Michael
Brown, and in inspiring the many other #Syllabus calls that soon followed.
The #Syllabus phenomenon comprises different approaches and modes of operating. In some cases, the material is clearly claimed as the creation of a single individual, as in the case of #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus, which is prefaced on the project’s
landing page by a warning to readers that ‘material compiled in this syllabus should
not be duplicated without proper citation and attribution.’9 A very different position on
intellectual property has been embraced by other #Syllabus interventions that have
chosen a more commoning stance. #StandingRockSyllabus, for instance, is introduced as a crowd-sourced process and as a useful ‘tool to access research usually
kept behind paywalls.’10
The different workflows, modes of engagements, and positioning in relation to
intellectual property make #Syllabus readable as symptomatic of the multiplicity
that composes social justice movements. There is something old school—quite
literally—about the idea of calling a list of online resources a ‘syllabus’; a certain
quaintness, evoking thoughts of teachers and homework. This is worthy of investigation especially if contrasted with the attention dedicated to other online cultural
phenomena such as memes or fake news. Could it be that the online syllabus offers
8
9
10
Marcia Chatelain, ‘How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson’, The Atlantic, 25
August 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-aboutwhats-happening-in-ferguson/379049/.
Frank Leon Roberts, ‘Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest’, 2016, http://
www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/.
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://
nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
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a useful, fresh format precisely for the characteristics that foreground its connections to older pedagogical traditions and techniques, predating digital cultures?
#Syllabus can indeed be analyzed as falling within a long lineage of pedagogical tools
created by social movements to support processes of political subjectivation and the
building of collective consciousness. Activists and militant organizers have time and
again created and used various textual media objects—such as handouts, pamphlets,
cookbooks, readers, or manifestos—to facilitate a shared political analysis and foment
mass political mobilization.
In the context of the US, anti-racist movements have historically placed great emphasis on critical pedagogy and self-education. In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (an alliance of civil rights initiatives) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), created a network of 41 temporary alternative
schools in Mississippi. Recently, the Freedom Library Project, a campaign born out
of #FergusonSyllabus to finance under-resourced pedagogical initiatives, openly
referenced this as a source of inspiration. The Freedom Summer Project of 1964
brought hundreds of activists, students, and scholars (many of whom were white)
from the north of the country to teach topics and issues that the discriminatory
state schools would not offer to black students. In the words of an SNCC report,
Freedom Schools were established following the belief that ‘education—facts to
use and freedom to use them—is the basis of democracy’,11 a conviction echoed
by the ethos of contemporary #Syllabus initiatives.
Bob Moses, a civil rights movement leader who was the head of the literary skills initiative in Mississippi, recalls the movement’s interest, at the time, in teaching methods
that used the very production of teaching materials as a pedagogical tool:
I had gotten hold of a text and was using it with some adults […] and noticed that
they couldn’t handle it because the pictures weren’t suited to what they knew […]
That got me into thinking about developing something closer to what people were
doing. What I was interested in was the idea of training SNCC workers to develop
material with the people we were working with.12
It is significant that for him the actual use of the materials the group created was much
less important than the process of producing the teaching materials together. This focus
on what could be named as a ‘pedagogy of teaching’, or perhaps more accurately ‘the
pedagogy of preparing teaching materials’, is also a relevant mechanism at play in the
current #Syllabus initiatives, as their crowdsourcing encourages different kinds of people
to contribute what they feel might be relevant resources for the broader movement.
Alongside the crucial import of radical black organizing, another relevant genealogy in
which to place #Syllabus would be the international feminist movement and, in particular, the strategies developed in the 70s campaign Wages for Housework, spearheaded
11
12
Daniel Perlstein, ‘Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools’,
History of Education Quarterly 30.3 (Autumn 1990): 302.
Perlstein, ‘Teaching Freedom’: 306.
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by Selma James and Silvia Federici. The Wages for Housework campaign drove home
the point that unwaged reproductive labor provides a foundation for capitalist exploitation. They wanted to encourage women to denaturalize and question the accepted
division of labor into remunerated work outside the house and labor of love within
the confines of domesticity, discussing taboo topics such as ‘prostitution as socialized housework’ and ‘forced sterilization’ as issues impacting poor, often racialized,
women. The organizing efforts of Wages for Housework held political pedagogy at their
core. They understood that that pedagogy required:
having literature and other materials available to explain our goals, all written in a
language that women can understand. We also need different types of documents,
some more theoretical, others circulating information about struggles. It is important
that we have documents for women who have never had any political experience.
This is why our priority is to write a popular pamphlet that we can distribute massively and for free—because women have no money.13
The obstacles faced by the Wages for Housework campaign were many, beginning
with the issue of how to reach a dispersed constituency of isolated housewives
and how to keep the revolutionary message at the core of their claims accessible
to different groups. In order to tackle these challenges, the organizers developed
a number of innovative communication tactics and pedagogical tools, including
strategies to gain mainstream media coverage, pamphlets and leaflets translated
into different languages,14 a storefront shop in Brooklyn, and promotional tables at
local events.
Freedom Schools and the Wages for Housework campaign are only two amongst
the many examples of the critical pedagogies developed within social movements.
The #Syllabus phenomenon clearly stands in the lineage of this history, yet we should
also highlight its specificity in relation to the contemporary political context in which it
emerged. The #Syllabus acknowledges that since the 70s—and also due to students’
participation in protests and their display of solidarity with other political movements—
subjects such as Marxist critical theory, women studies, gender studies, and African
American studies, together with some of the principles first developed in critical pedagogy, have become integrated into the educational system. The fact that many initiators of #Syllabus initiatives are women and Black academics speaks to this historical
shift as an achievement of that period of struggles. However, the very necessity felt by
these educators to kick-start their #Syllabus campaigns outside the confines of academia simultaneously reveals the difficulties they encounter within the current privatized and exclusionary educational complex.
13
14
Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin (eds) The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977:
History, Theory and Documents. New York: Autonomedia, 2017: 37.
Some of the flyers and pamphlets were digitized by MayDay Rooms, ‘a safe haven for historical
material linked to social movements, experimental culture and the radical expression of
marginalised figures and groups’ in London, and can be found in their online archive: ‘Wages
for Housework: Pamphlets – Flyers – Photographs’, MayDay Rooms, http://maydayrooms.org/
archives/wages-for-housework/wfhw-pamphlets-flyers-photographs/.
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#Syllabus as a Media Object
Besides its contextualization within the historical legacy of previous grassroots mobilizations, it is also necessary to discuss #Syllabus as a new media object in its own
right, in order to fully grasp its relevance for the future politics of knowledge production and transmission.
If we were to describe this object, a #Syllabus would be an ordered list of links to
scholarly texts, news reports, and audiovisual media, mostly aggregated through a
participatory and iterative process, and created in response to political events indicative of larger conditions of structural oppression. Still, as we have seen, #Syllabus
as a media object doesn’t follow a strict format. It varies based on the initial vision
of their initiators, political causes, and social composition of the relevant struggle.
Nor does it follow the format of traditional academic syllabi. While a list of learning
resources is at the heart of any syllabus, a boilerplate university syllabus typically
also includes objectives, a timetable, attendance, coursework, examination, and an
outline of the grading system used for the given course. Relieved of these institutional
requirements, the #Syllabus typically includes only a reading list and a hashtag. The
reading list provides resources for understanding what is relevant to the here and
now, while the hashtag provides a way to disseminate across social networks the call
to both collectively edit and teach what is relevant to the here and now. Both the list
and the hashtag are specificities and formal features of the contemporary (internet)
culture and therefore merit further exploration in relation to the social dynamics at
play in #Syllabus initiatives.
The different phases of the internet’s development approached the problem of the
discoverability of relevant information in different ways. In the early days, the Gopher
protocol organized information into a hierarchical file tree. With the rise of World Wide
Web (WWW), Yahoo tried to employ experts to classify and catalog the internet into
a directory of links. That seemed to be a successful approach for a while, but then
Google (founded in 1998) came along and started to use a webgraph of links to rank
the importance of web pages relative to a given search query.
In 2005, Clay Shirky wrote the essay ‘Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and
Tags’,15 developed from his earlier talk ‘Folksonomies and Tags: The Rise of User-Developed Classification’. Shirky used Yahoo’s attempt to categorize the WWW to argue
against any attempt to classify a vast heterogenous body of information into a single
hierarchical categorical system. In his words: ‘[Yahoo] missed [...] that, if you’ve got
enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file
system. The links alone are enough.’ Those words resonated with many. By following
simple formatting rules, we, the internet users, whom Time magazine named Person of
the Year in 2006, proved that it is possible to collectively write the largest encyclopedia
ever. But, even beyond that, and as per Shirky’s argument, if enough of us organized
our own snippets of the vast body of the internet, we could replace old canons, hierarchies, and ontologies with folksonomies, social bookmarks, and (hash)tags.
15
Clay Shirky, ‘Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, 2005, http://shirky.com/writings/
herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.
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Very few who lived through those times would have thought that only a few years later
most user-driven services would be acquired by a small number of successful companies and then be shut down. Or, that Google would decide not to include the biggest
hashtag-driven platform, Twitter, into its search index and that the search results on
its first page would only come from a handful of usual suspects: media conglomerates, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Reddit, Quora. Or, that Twitter would
become the main channel for the racist, misogynist, fascist escapades of the President
of United States.
This internet folk naivety—stoked by an equally enthusiastic, venture-capital-backed
startup culture—was not just naivety. This was also a period of massive experimental
use of these emerging platforms. Therefore, this history would merit to be properly
revisited and researched. In this text, however, we can only hint to this history: to contextualize how the hashtag as a formalization initially emerged, and how with time the
user-driven web lost some of its potential. Nonetheless, hashtags today still succeed in
propagating political mobilizations in the network environment. Some will say that this
propagation is nothing but a reflection of the internet as a propaganda machine, and
there’s no denying that hashtags do serve a propaganda function. However, it equally
matters that hashtags retain the capacity to shape coordination and self-organization,
and they are therefore a reflection of the internet as an organization machine.
As mentioned, #Syllabus as a media object is an ordered list of links to resources.
In the long history of knowledge retrieval systems and attempts to help users find
relevant information from big archives, the list on the internet continues in the tradition of the index card catalog in libraries, of charts in the music industry, or mixtapes
and playlists in popular culture, helping people tell their stories of what is relevant and
what isn’t through an ordered sequence of items. The list (as a format) together with
the hashtag find themselves in the list (pun intended) of the most iconic media objects
of the internet. In the network media environment, being smart in creating new lists
became the way to displace old lists of relevance, the way to dismantle canons, the
way to unlearn. The way to become relevant.
The Academic Syllabus Migrates Online
#Syllabus interventions are a challenge issued by political struggles to educators as
they expose a fundamental contradiction in the operations of academia. While critical pedagogies of yesteryear’s social movements have become integrated into the
education system, the radical lessons that these pedagogies teach students don’t
easily reconcile with their experience: professional practice courses, the rethoric of
employability and compulsory internships, where what they learn is merely instrumental, leaves them wondering how on earth they are to apply their Marxism or feminism
to their everyday lives?
Cognitive dissonance is at the basis of degrees in the liberal arts. And to make things
worse, the marketization of higher education, the growing fees and the privatization
of research has placed universities in a position where they increasingly struggle to
provide institutional space for critical interventions in social reality. As universities become more dependent on the ‘customer satisfaction’ of their students for survival, they
steer away from heated political topics or from supporting faculty members who might
decide to engage with them. Borrowing the words of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten,
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‘policy posits curriculum against study’,16 creating the paradoxical situation wherein
today’s universities are places in which it is possible to do almost everything except
study. What Harney and Moten propose instead is the re-appropriation of the diffuse
capacity of knowledge generation that stems from the collective processes of selforganization and commoning. As Moten puts it: ‘When I think about the way we use the
term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other
people.’17 And it is this practice of sharing a common repertoire—what Moten and
Harney call ‘rehearsal’18—that is crucially constitutive of a crowdsourced #Syllabus.
This contradiction and the tensions it brings to contemporary neoliberal academia can
be symptomatically observed in the recent evolution of the traditional academic syllabus. As a double consequence of (some) critical pedagogies becoming incorporated
into the teaching process and universities striving to reduce their liability risks, academic syllabi have become increasingly complex and extensive documents. They are
now understood as both a ‘social contract’ between the teachers and their students,
and ‘terms of service’19 between the institution providing educational services and the
students increasingly framed as sovereign consumers making choices in the market of
educational services. The growing official import of the syllabus has had the effect that
educators have started to reflect on how the syllabus translates the power dynamics
into their classroom. For instance, the critical pedagogue Adam Heidebrink-Bruno has
demanded that the syllabus be re-conceived as a manifesto20—a document making
these concerns explicit. And indeed, many academics have started to experiment with
the form and purpose of the syllabus, opening it up to a process of co-conceptualization with their students, or proposing ‘the other syllabus’21 to disrupt asymmetries.
At the same time, universities are unsurprisingly moving their syllabi online. A migration
that can be read as indicative of three larger structural shifts in academia.
First, the push to make syllabi available online, initiated in the US, reinforces the differential effects of reputation economy. It is the Ivy League universities and their professorial star system that can harness the syllabus to advertise the originality of their
scholarship, while the underfunded public universities and junior academics are burdened with teaching the required essentials. This practice is tied up with the replication
in academia of the different valorization between what is considered to be the labor of
production (research) and that of social reproduction (teaching). The low esteem (and
corresponding lower rewards and remuneration) for the kinds of intellectual labors that
can be considered labors of care—editing journals, reviewing papers or marking, for
instance—fits perfectly well with the gendered legacies of the academic institution.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York:
Autonomedia, 2013, p. 81.
17 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 110.
18 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 110.
19 Angela Jenks, ‘It’s In The Syllabus’, Teaching Tools, Cultural Anthropology website, 30 June 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/910-it-s-in-the-syllabu/.
20 Adam Heidebrink-Bruno, ‘Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture’,
Hybrid Pedagogy, 28 August 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-criticalapproach-classroom-culture/.
21 Lucy E. Bailey, ‘The “Other” Syllabus: Rendering Teaching Politics Visible in the Graduate
Pedagogy Seminar’, Feminist Teacher 20.2 (2010): 139–56.
16
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Second, with the withdrawal of resources to pay precarious and casualized academics during their ‘prep’ time (that is, the time in which they can develop new
course material, including assembling new lists of references, updating their courses as well as the methodologies through which they might deliver these), syllabi
now assume an ambivalent role between the tendencies for collectivization and
individualization of insecurity. The reading lists contained in syllabi are not covered
by copyrights; they are like playlists or recipes, which historically had the effect of
encouraging educators to exchange lesson plans and make their course outlines
freely available as a valuable knowledge common. Yet, in the current climate where
universities compete against each other, the authorial function is being extended
to these materials too. Recently, US universities have been leading a trend towards
the interpretation of the syllabus as copyrightable material, an interpretation that
opened up, as would be expected, a number of debates over who is a syllabus’
rightful owner, whether the academics themselves or their employers. If the latter interpretation were to prevail, this would enable universities to easily replace
academics while retaining their contributions to the pedagogical offer. The fruits of
a teacher’s labor could thus be turned into instruments of their own deskilling and
casualization: why would universities pay someone to write a course when they can
recycle someone else’s syllabus and get a PhD student or a precarious post doc to
teach the same class at a fraction of the price?
This tendency to introduce a logic of property therefore spurs competitive individualism and erasure of contributions from others. Thus, crowdsourcing the syllabus
in the context of growing precarization of labor risks remaining a partial process,
as it might heighten the anxieties of those educators who do not enjoy the security
of a stable job and who are therefore the most susceptible to the false promises of
copyright enforcement and authorship understood as a competitive, small entrepreneurial activity. However, when inserted in the context of live, broader political
struggles, the opening up of the syllabus could and should be an encouragement
to go in the opposite direction, providing a ground to legitimize the collective nature
of the educational process and to make all academic resources available without
copyright restrictions, while devising ways to secure the proper attribution and the
just remuneration of everyone’s labor.
The introduction of the logic of property is hard to challenge as it is furthered by commercial academic publishers. Oligopolists, such as Elsevier, are not only notorious for
using copyright protections to extract usurious profits from the mostly free labor of
those who write, peer review, and edit academic journals,22 but they are now developing all sorts of metadata, metrics, and workflow systems that are increasingly becoming central for teaching and research. In addition to their publishing business, Elsevier
has expanded its ‘research intelligence’ offering, which now encompasses a whole
range of digital services, including the Scopus citation database; Mendeley reference
manager; the research performance analytics tools SciVal and Research Metrics; the
centralized research management system Pure; the institutional repository and pub-
22 Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, ‘The Oligopoly of Academic
Publishers in the Digital Era’, PLoS ONE 10.6 (10 June 2015),https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502/.
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lishing platform Bepress; and, last but not least, grant discovery and funding flow tools
Funding Institutional and Elsevier Funding Solutions. Given how central digital services
are becoming in today’s universities, whoever owns these platforms is the university.
Third, the migration online of the academic syllabus falls into larger efforts by universities to ‘disrupt’ the educational system through digital technologies. The introduction
of virtual learning environments has led to lesson plans, slides, notes, and syllabi becoming items to be deposited with the institution. The doors of public higher education are being opened to commercial qualification providers by means of the rise in
metrics-based management, digital platforming of university services, and transformation of students into consumers empowered to make ‘real-time’ decisions on how to
spend their student debt.23 Such neoliberalization masquerading behind digitization
is nowhere more evident than in the hype that was generated around Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), exactly at the height of the last economic crisis.
MOOCs developed gradually from the Massachusetts Institute of Techology’s (MIT) initial experiments with opening up its teaching materials to the public through the OpenCourseWare project in 2001. By 2011, MOOCs were saluted as a full-on democratization of access to ‘Ivy-League-caliber education [for] the world’s poor.’24 And yet, their
promise quickly deflated following extremely low completion rates (as low as 5%).25
Believing that in fifty years there will be no more than 10 institutions globally delivering
higher education,26 by the end of 2013 Sebastian Thrun (Google’s celebrated roboticist
who in 2012 founded the for-profit MOOC platform Udacity), had to admit that Udacity
offered a ‘lousy product’ that proved to be a total failure with ‘students from difficult
neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in
their lives.’27 Critic Aaron Bady has thus rightfully argued that:
[MOOCs] demonstrate what the technology is not good at: accreditation and mass
education. The MOOC rewards self-directed learners who have the resources and
privilege that allow them to pursue learning for its own sake [...] MOOCs are also a
really poor way to make educational resources available to underserved and underprivileged communities, which has been the historical mission of public education.28
Indeed, the ‘historical mission of public education’ was always and remains to this
day highly contested terrain—the very idea of a public good being under attack by
dominant managerial techniques that try to redefine it, driving what Randy Martin
23 Ben Williamson, ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’,
Medium, 16 August 2018, https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-highereducation-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7.
24 Max Chafkin, ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course’,
FastCompany, 14 November 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb/.
25 ‘The Rise (and Fall?) Of the MOOC’, Oxbridge Essays, 14 November 2017, https://www.
oxbridgeessays.com/blog/rise-fall-mooc/.
26 Steven Leckart, ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’,
Wired, 20 March 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/.
27 Chafkin, ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun’.
28 Aaron Bady, ‘The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform’, Liberal Education 99.4 (Fall 2013),
https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/mooc-moment-and-end-reform.
126
STATE MACHINES
aptly called the ‘financialization of daily life.’29 The failure of MOOCs finally points to a
broader question, also impacting the vicissitudes of #Syllabus: Where will actual study
practices find refuge in the social, once the social is made directly productive for capital at all times? Where will study actually ‘take place’, in the literal sense of the phrase,
claiming the resources that it needs for co-creation in terms of time, labor, and love?
Learning from #Syllabus
What have we learned from the #Syllabus phenomenon?
The syllabus is the manifesto of 21st century.
Political struggles against structural discrimination, oppression, and violence in the
present are continuing the legacy of critical pedagogies of earlier social movements
that coupled the process of political subjectivation with that of collective education.
By creating effective pedagogical tools, movements have brought educators and students into the fold of their struggles. In the context of our new network environment,
political struggles have produced a new media object: #Syllabus, a crowdsourced list
of resources—historic and present—relevant to a cause. By doing so, these struggles
adapt, resist, and live in and against the networks dominated by techno-capital, with
all of the difficulties and contradictions that entails.
What have we learned from the academic syllabus migrating online?
In the contemporary university, critical pedagogy is clashing head-on with the digitization of higher education. Education that should empower and research that should
emancipate are increasingly left out in the cold due to the data-driven marketization
of academia, short-cutting the goals of teaching and research to satisfy the fluctuating demands of labor market and financial speculation. Resistance against the capture of data, research workflows, and scholarship by means of digitization is a key
struggle for the future of mass intellectuality beyond exclusions of class, disability,
gender, and race.
What have we learned from #Syllabus as a media object?
As old formats transform into new media objects, the digital network environment defines the conditions in which these new media objects try to adjust, resist, and live. A
right intuition can intervene and change the landscape—not necessarily for the good,
particularly if the imperatives of capital accumulation and social control prevail. We
thus need to re-appropriate the process of production and distribution of #Syllabus
as a media object in its totality. We need to build tools to collectively control the workflows that are becoming the infrastructures on top of which we collaboratively produce
knowledge that is vital for us to adjust, resist, and live. In order to successfully intervene in the world, every aspect of production and distribution of these new media objects becomes relevant. Every single aspect counts. The order of items in a list counts.
The timestamp of every version of the list counts. The name of every contributor to
29 Randy Martin, Financialization Of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
ACTIONS
127
every version of the list counts. Furthermore, the workflow to keep track of all of these
aspects is another complex media object—a software tool of its own—with its own order and its own versions. It is a recursive process of creating an autonomous ecology.
#Syllabus can be conceived as a recursive process of versioning lists, pointing to textual, audiovisual, or other resources. With all of the linked resources publicly accessible to all; with all versions of the lists editable by all; with all of the edits attributable to
their contributors; with all versions, all linked resources, all attributions preservable by
all, just such an autonomous ecology can be made for #Syllabus. In fact, Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office have already proposed such a methodology in
their Hyperreadings, a forkable readme.md plaintext document on GitHub. They write:
A text that by its nature points to other texts, the syllabus is already a relational
document acknowledging its own position within a living field of knowledge. It is
decidedly not self-contained, however it often circulates as if it were.
If a syllabus circulated as a HyperReadings document, then it could point directly to the texts and other media that it aggregates. But just as easily as it circulates, a HyperReadings syllabus could be forked into new versions: the syllabus
is changed because there is a new essay out, or because of a political disagreement, or because following the syllabus produced new suggestions. These forks
become a family tree where one can follow branches and trace epistemological
mutations.30
It is in line with this vision, which we share with the HyperReadings crew, and in line
with our analysis, that we, as amateur librarians, activists, and educators, make our
promise beyond the limits of this text.
The workflow that we are bootstrapping here will keep in mind every aspect of the media object syllabus (order, timestamp, contributor, version changes), allowing diversity
via forking and branching, and making sure that every reference listed in a syllabus
will find its reference in a catalog which will lead to the actual material, in digital form,
needed for the syllabus.
Against the enclosures of copyright, we will continue building shadow libraries and
archives of struggles, providing access to resources needed for the collective processes of education.
Against the corporate platforming of workflows and metadata, we will work with social
movements, political initiatives, educators, and researchers to aggregate, annotate,
version, and preserve lists of resources.
Against the extractivism of academia, we will take care of the material conditions that
are needed for such collective thinking to take place, both on- and offline.
30 Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, ‘README.md’, Hyperreadings, 15 February
2018, https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
128
STATE MACHINES
Bibliography
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www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/mooc-moment-and-end-reform/.
Bailey, Lucy E. ‘The “Other” Syllabus: Rendering Teaching Politics Visible in the Graduate Pedagogy
Seminar’, Feminist Teacher 20.2 (2010): 139–56.
Chafkin, Max. ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course’,
FastCompany, 14 November 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb/.
Chatelain, Marcia. ‘How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson’, The Atlantic, 25 August
2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-about-whatshappening-in-ferguson/379049/.
_____. ‘Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus’, Dissent Magazine, 28 November 2014, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus/.
Ciolkowski, Laura. ‘Rape Culture Syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October 2016, https://www.publicbooks.
org/rape-culture-syllabus/.
Connolly, N.D.B. and Keisha N. Blain. ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’, Public Books, 28 June 2016, https://www.
publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/.
Dockray, Sean, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office. ‘README.md’, HyperReadings, 15 February 2018,
https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
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Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York:
Autonomedia, 2013.
Heidebrink-Bruno, Adam. ‘Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture’, Hybrid
Pedagogy, 28 August 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-critical-approach-classroom-culture/.
Jenks, Angela. ‘It’s In The Syllabus’, Teaching Tools, Cultural Anthropology website, 30 June 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/910-it-s-in-the-syllabus/.
Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, ‘The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era’, PLoS ONE 10.6 (10 June 2015), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502/.
Leckart, Steven. ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’, Wired,
20 March 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/.
Martin, Randy. Financialization Of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Perlstein, Daniel. ‘Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools’,
History of Education Quarterly 30.3 (Autumn 1990).
Roberts, Frank Leon. ‘Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest’, 2016, http://www.
blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/.
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
Shirky, Clay. ‘Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, 2005, http://shirky.com/writings/
herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.
‘The Rise (and Fall?) Of the MOOC’, Oxbridge Essays, 14 November 2017, https://www.oxbridgeessays.
com/blog/rise-fall-mooc/.
‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’, The New Inquiry, 2 September 2014, https://thenewinquiry.com/
tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
‘Trump 101’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 June 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/
Trump-Syllabus/236824/.
‘Wages for Housework: Pamphlets – Flyers – Photographs,’ MayDay Rooms, http://maydayrooms.org/
archives/wages-for-housework/wfhw-pamphlets-flyers-photographs/.
Williamson, Ben. ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’,
Medium, 16 August 2018, https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-highereducation-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7/.
USDC
Complaint: Elsevier v. SciHub and LibGen
2015
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 1 of 16
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
SCI-HUB d/b/a WWW.SCI-HUB.ORG, THE LIBRARY GENESIS PROJECT d/b/a LIBGEN.ORG, ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN, JOHN DOES 1-99,
Defendants.
Plaintiffs Elsevier Inc, Elsevier B.V., and Elsevier Ltd. (collectively “Elsevier”),
by their attorneys DeVore & DeMarco LLP, for their complaint against www.scihub.org,
www.libgen.org, Alexandra Elbakyan, and John Does 1-99 (collectively the “Defendants”),
allege as follows:
NATURE OF THE ACTION
1. This is a civil action seeking damages and injunctive relief for: (1) copyright infringement under the copyright laws of the United States (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.); and (2) violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18.U.S.C. § 1030, based upon Defendants’ unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of Elsevier’s copyrighted works. Defendants’ actions in this regard have caused and continue to cause irreparable injury to Elsevier and its publishing partners (including scholarly societies) for which it publishes certain journals.
1
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 2 of 16
PARTIES
2. Plaintiff Elsevier Inc. is a corporation organized under the laws of Delaware, with its principal place of business at 360 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10010.
3. Plaintiff Elsevier B.V. is a corporation organized under the laws of the Netherlands, with its principal place of business at Radarweg 29, Amsterdam, 1043 NX, Netherlands.
4. Plaintiff Elsevier Ltd. is a corporation organized under the laws of the United Kingdom, with its principal place of business at 125 London Wall, EC2Y 5AS United Kingdom.
5. Upon information and belief, Defendant Sci-Hub is an individual or organization engaged in the operation of the website accessible at the URL “www.sci-hub.org,” and related subdomains, including but not limited to the subdomain “www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.org,”
www.elsevier.com.sci-hub.org,” “store.elsevier.com.sci-hub.org,” and various subdomains
incorporating the company and product names of other major global publishers (collectively with www.sci-hub.org the “Sci-Hub Website”). The sci-hub.org domain name is registered by
“Fundacion Private Whois,” located in Panama City, Panama, to an unknown registrant. As of
the date of this filing, the Sci-Hub Website is assigned the IP address 31.184.194.81. This IP address is part of a range of IP addresses assigned to Petersburg Internet Network Ltd., a webhosting company located in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
6. Upon information and belief, Defendant Library Genesis Project is an organization which operates an online repository of copyrighted materials accessible through the website located at the URL “libgen.org” as well as a number of other “mirror” websites
(collectively the “Libgen Domains”). The libgen.org domain is registered by “Whois Privacy
Corp.,” located at Ocean Centre, Montagu Foreshore, East Bay Street, Nassau, New Providence,
2
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 3 of 16
Bahamas, to an unknown registrant. As of the date of this filing, libgen.org is assigned the IP address 93.174.95.71. This IP address is part of a range of IP addresses assigned to Ecatel Ltd., a web-hosting company located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
7. The Libgen Domains include “elibgen.org,” “libgen.info,” “lib.estrorecollege.org,” and “bookfi.org.”
8. Upon information and belief, Defendant Alexandra Elbakyan is the principal owner and/or operator of Sci-Hub. Upon information and belief, Elbakyan is a resident of Almaty, Kazakhstan.
9. Elsevier is unaware of the true names and capacities of the individuals named as Does 1-99 in this Complaint (together with Alexandra Elbakyan, the “Individual Defendants”),
and their residence and citizenship is also unknown. Elsevier will amend its Complaint to allege the names, capacities, residence and citizenship of the Doe Defendants when their identities are learned.
10. Upon information and belief, the Individual Defendants are the owners and operators of numerous of websites, including Sci-Hub and the websites located at the various
Libgen Domains, and a number of e-mail addresses and accounts at issue in this case.
11. The Individual Defendants have participated, exercised control over, and benefited from the infringing conduct described herein, which has resulted in substantial harm to
the Plaintiffs.
JURISDICTION AND VENUE
12. This is a civil action arising from the Defendants’ violations of the copyright laws of the United States (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”),
3
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 4 of 16
18.U.S.C. § 1030. Therefore, the Court has subject matter jurisdiction over this action pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1331.
13. Upon information and belief, the Individual Defendants own and operate computers and Internet websites and engage in conduct that injures Plaintiff in this district, while
also utilizing instrumentalities located in the Southern District of New York to carry out the acts complained of herein.
14. Defendants have affirmatively directed actions at the Southern District of New York by utilizing computer servers located in the District without authorization and by
unlawfully obtaining access credentials belonging to individuals and entities located in the
District, in order to unlawfully access, copy, and distribute Elsevier's copyrighted materials
which are stored on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform.
15.
Defendants have committed the acts complained of herein through unauthorized
access to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted materials which are stored and maintained on computer servers
located in the Southern District of New York.
16.
Defendants have undertaken the acts complained of herein with knowledge that
such acts would cause harm to Plaintiffs and their customers in both the Southern District of
New York and elsewhere. Defendants have caused the Plaintiff injury while deriving revenue
from interstate or international commerce by committing the acts complained of herein.
Therefore, this Court has personal jurisdiction over Defendants.
17.
Venue in this District is proper under 28 U.S.C. § 1391(b) because a substantial
part of the events giving rise to Plaintiffs’ claims occurred in this District and because the
property that is the subject of Plaintiffs’ claims is situated in this District.
4
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 5 of 16
FACTUAL ALLEGATIONS
Elsevier’s Copyrights in Publications on ScienceDirect
18.
Elsevier is a world leading provider of professional information solutions in the
Science, Medical, and Health sectors. Elsevier publishes, markets, sells, and licenses academic
textbooks, journals, and examinations in the fields of science, medicine, and health. The
majority of Elsevier’s institutional customers are universities, governmental entities, educational
institutions, and hospitals that purchase physical and electronic copies of Elsevier’s products and
access to Elsevier’s digital libraries. Elsevier distributes its scientific journal articles and book
chapters electronically via its proprietary subscription database “ScienceDirect”
(www.sciencedirect.com). In most cases, Elsevier holds the copyright and/or exclusive
distribution rights to the works available through ScienceDirect. In addition, Elsevier holds
trademark rights in “Elsevier,” “ScienceDirect,” and several other related trade names.
19.
The ScienceDirect database is home to almost one-quarter of the world's peer-
reviewed, full-text scientific, technical and medical content. The ScienceDirect service features
sophisticated search and retrieval tools for students and professionals which facilitates access to
over 10 million copyrighted publications. More than 15 million researchers, health care
professionals, teachers, students, and information professionals around the globe rely on
ScienceDirect as a trusted source of nearly 2,500 journals and more than 26,000 book titles.
20.
Authorized users are provided access to the ScienceDirect platform by way of
non-exclusive, non-transferable subscriptions between Elsevier and its institutional customers.
According to the terms and conditions of these subscriptions, authorized users of ScienceDirect
must be users affiliated with the subscriber (e.g., full-time and part-time students, faculty, staff
5
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 6 of 16
and researchers of subscriber universities and individuals using computer terminals within the
library facilities at the subscriber for personal research, education or other non-corporate use.)
21.
A substantial portion of American research universities maintain active
subscriptions to ScienceDirect. These subscriptions, under license, allow the universities to
provide their faculty and students access to the copyrighted works within the ScienceDirect
database.
22.
Elsevier stores and maintains the copyrighted material available in ScienceDirect
on servers owned and operated by a third party whose servers are located in the Southern District
of New York and elsewhere. In order to optimize performance, these third-party servers
collectively operate as a distributed network which serves cached copies of Elsevier’s
copyrighted materials by way of particular servers that are geographically close to the user. For
example, a user that accesses ScienceDirect from a University located in the Southern District of
New York will likely be served that content from a server physically located in the District.
Authentication of Authorized University ScienceDirect Users
23.
Elsevier maintains the integrity and security of the copyrighted works accessible
on ScienceDirect by allowing only authenticated users access to the platform. Elsevier
authenticates educational users who access ScienceDirect through their affiliated university’s
subscription by verifying that they are able to access ScienceDirect from a computer system or
network previously identified as belonging to a subscribing university.
24.
Elsevier does not track individual educational users’ access to ScienceDirect.
Instead, Elsevier verifies only that the user has authenticated access to a subscribing university.
25.
Once an educational user authenticates his computer with ScienceDirect on a
university network, that computer is permitted access to ScienceDirect for a limited amount of
6
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 7 of 16
time without re-authenticating. For example, a student could access ScienceDirect from their
laptop while sitting in a university library, then continue to access ScienceDirect using that
laptop from their dorm room later that day. After a specified period of time has passed, however,
a user will have to re-authenticate his or her computer’s access to ScienceDirect by connecting to
the platform through a university network.
26.
As a matter of practice, educational users access university networks, and thereby
authenticate their computers with ScienceDirect, primarily through one of two methods. First,
the user may be physically connected to a university network, for example by taking their
computer to the university’s library. Second, the user may connect remotely to the university’s
network using a proxy connection. Universities offer proxy connections to their students and
faculty so that those users may access university computing resources – including access to
research databases such as ScienceDirect – from remote locations which are unaffiliated with the
university. This practice facilitates the use of ScienceDirect by students and faculty while they
are at home, travelling, or otherwise off-campus.
Defendants’ Unauthorized Access to University Proxy Networks to Facilitate Copyright
Infringement
27.
Upon information and belief, Defendants are reproducing and distributing
unauthorized copies of Elsevier’s copyrighted materials, unlawfully obtained from
ScienceDirect, through Sci-Hub and through various websites affiliated with the Library Genesis
Project. Specifically, Defendants utilize their websites located at sci-hub.org and at the Libgen
Domains to operate an international network of piracy and copyright infringement by
circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database. Defendants’
piracy is supported by the persistent intrusion and unauthorized access to the computer networks
7
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 8 of 16
of Elsevier and its institutional subscribers, including universities located in the Southern District
of New York.
28.
Upon information and belief, Defendants have unlawfully obtained and continue
to unlawfully obtain student or faculty access credentials which permit proxy connections to
universities which subscribe to ScienceDirect, and use these credentials to gain unauthorized
access to ScienceDirect.
29.
Upon information and belief, Defendants have used and continue to use such
access credentials to authenticate access to ScienceDirect and, subsequently, to obtain
copyrighted scientific journal articles therefrom without valid authorization.
30.
The Sci-Hub website requires user interaction in order to facilitate its illegal
copyright infringement scheme. Specifically, before a Sci-Hub user can obtain access to
copyrighted scholarly journals, articles, and books that are maintained by ScienceDirect, he must
first perform a search on the Sci-Hub page. A Sci-Hub user may search for content using either
(a) a general keyword-based search, or (b) a journal, article or book identifier (such as a Digital
Object Identifier, PubMed Identifier, or the source URL).
31.
When a user performs a keyword search on Sci-Hub, the website returns a proxied
version of search results from the Google Scholar search database. 1 When a user selects one of
the search results, if the requested content is not available from the Library Genesis Project, SciHub unlawfully retrieves the content from ScienceDirect using the access previously obtained.
Sci-Hub then provides a copy of that article to the requesting user, typically in PDF format. If,
however, the requested content can be found in the Library Genesis Project repository, upon
1
Google Scholar provides its users the capability to search for scholarly literature, but does not provide the
full text of copyrighted scientific journal articles accessible through paid subscription services such as
ScienceDirect. Instead, Google Scholar provides bibliographic information concerning such articles along with a
link to the platform through which the article may be purchased or accessed by a subscriber.
8
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 9 of 16
information and belief, Sci-Hub obtains the content from the Library Genesis Project repository
and provides that content to the user.
32.
When a user searches on Sci-Hub for an article available on ScienceDirect using a
journal or article identifier, the user is redirected to a proxied version of the ScienceDirect page
where the user can download the requested article at no cost. Upon information and belief, SciHub facilitates this infringing conduct by using unlawfully-obtained access credentials to
university proxy servers to establish remote access to ScienceDirect through those proxy servers.
If, however, the requested content can be found in the Library Genesis Project repository, upon
information and belief, Sci-Hub obtains the content from it and provides it to the user.
33.
Upon information and belief, Sci-Hub engages in no other activity other than the
illegal reproduction and distribution of digital copies of Elsevier’s copyrighted works and the
copyrighted works of other publishers, and the encouragement, inducement, and material
contribution to the infringement of the copyrights of those works by third parties – i.e., the users
of the Sci-Hub website.
34.
Upon information and belief, in addition to the blatant and rampant infringement
of Elsevier’s copyrights as described above, the Defendants have also used the Sci-Hub website
to earn revenue from the piracy of copyrighted materials from ScienceDirect. Sci-Hub has at
various times accepted funds through a variety of payment processors, including PayPal,
Yandex, WebMoney, QiQi, and Bitcoin.
Sci-Hub’s Use of the Library Genesis Project as a Repository for Unlawfully-Obtained
Scientific Journal Articles and Books
35.
Upon information and belief, when Sci-Hub pirates and downloads an article from
ScienceDirect in response to a user request, in addition to providing a copy of that article to that
user, Sci-Hub also provides a duplicate copy to the Library Genesis Project, which stores the
9
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 10 of 16
article in a database accessible through the Internet. Upon information and belief, the Library
Genesis Project is designed to be a permanent repository of this and other illegally obtained
content.
36.
Upon information and belief, in the event that a Sci-Hub user requests an article
which has already been provided to the Library Genesis Project, Sci-Hub may provide that user
access to a copy provided by the Library Genesis Project rather than re-download an additional
copy of the article from ScienceDirect. As a result, Defendants Sci-Hub and Library Genesis
Project act in concert to engage in a scheme designed to facilitate the unauthorized access to and
wholesale distribution of Elsevier’s copyrighted works legitimately available on the
ScienceDirect platform.
The Library Genesis Project’s Unlawful Distribution of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Works
37.
Access to the Library Genesis Project’s repository is facilitated by the website
“libgen.org,” which provides its users the ability to search, download content from, and upload
content to, the repository. The main page of libgen.org allows its users to perform searches in
various categories, including “LibGen (Sci-Tech),” and “Scientific articles.” In addition to
searching by keyword, users may also search for specific content by various other fields,
including title, author, periodical, publisher, or ISBN or DOI number.
38.
The libgen.org website indicates that the Library Genesis Project repository
contains approximately 1 million “Sci-Tech” documents and 40 million scientific articles. Upon
information and belief, the large majority of these works is subject to copyright protection and is
being distributed through the Library Genesis Project without the permission of the applicable
rights-holder. Upon information and belief, the Library Genesis Project serves primarily, if not
10
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 11 of 16
exclusively, as a scheme to violate the intellectual property rights of the owners of millions of
copyrighted works.
39.
Upon information and belief, Elsevier owns the copyrights in a substantial
number of copyrighted materials made available for distribution through the Library Genesis
Project. Elsevier has not authorized the Library Genesis Project or any of the Defendants to
copy, display, or distribute through any of the complained of websites any of the content stored
on ScienceDirect to which it holds the copyright. Among the works infringed by the Library
Genesis Project are the “Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology,” and the article “The
Varus Ankle and Instability” (published in Elsevier’s journal “Foot and Ankle Clinics of North
America”), each of which is protected by Elsevier’s federally-registered copyrights.
40.
In addition to the Library Genesis Project website accessible at libgen.org, users
may access the Library Genesis Project repository through a number of “mirror” sites accessible
through other URLs. These mirror sites are similar, if not identical, in functionality to
libgen.org. Specifically, the mirror sites allow their users to search and download materials from
the Library Genesis Project repository.
FIRST CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Direct Infringement of Copyright)
41.
Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40
42.
Elsevier’s copyright rights and exclusive distribution rights to the works available
above.
on ScienceDirect (the “Works”) are valid and enforceable.
43.
Defendants have infringed on Elsevier’s copyright rights to these Works by
knowingly and intentionally reproducing and distributing these Works without authorization.
11
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 12 of 16
44.
The acts of infringement described herein have been willful, intentional, and
purposeful, in disregard of and indifferent to Plaintiffs’ rights.
45.
Without authorization from Elsevier, or right under law, Defendants are directly
liable for infringing Elsevier’s copyrighted Works pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§ 106(1) and/or (3).
46.
As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to
suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
47.
Elsevier seeks injunctive relief and costs and damages in an amount to be proven
at trial.
SECOND CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Secondary Infringement of Copyright)
48.
Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40
49.
Elsevier’s copyright rights and exclusive distribution rights to the works available
above.
on ScienceDirect (the “Works”) are valid and enforceable.
50.
Defendants have infringed on Elsevier’s copyright rights to these Works by
knowingly and intentionally reproducing and distributing these Works without license or other
authorization.
51.
Upon information and belief, Defendants intentionally induced, encouraged, and
materially contributed to the reproduction and distribution of these Works by third party users of
websites operated by Defendants.
52.
The acts of infringement described herein have been willful, intentional, and
purposeful, in disregard of and indifferent to Elsevier’s rights.
12
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 13 of 16
53.
Without authorization from Elsevier, or right under law, Defendants are directly
liable for third parties’ infringement of Elsevier’s copyrighted Works pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§
106(1) and/or (3).
54.
Upon information and belief, Defendants profited from third parties’ direct
infringement of Elsevier’s Works.
55.
Defendants had the right and the ability to supervise and control their websites
and the third party infringing activities described herein.
56.
As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to
suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
57.
Elsevier seeks injunctive relief and costs and damages in an amount to be proven
at trial.
THIRD CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Violation of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act)
58.
Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40
59.
Elsevier’s computers and servers, the third-party computers and servers which
above.
store and maintain Elsevier’s copyrighted works for ScienceDirect, and Elsevier’s customers’
computers and servers which facilitate access to Elsevier’s copyrighted works on ScienceDirect,
are all “protected computers” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”).
60.
Defendants (a) knowingly and intentionally accessed such protected computers
without authorization and thereby obtained information from the protected computers in a
transaction involving an interstate or foreign communication (18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C)); and
(b) knowingly and with an intent to defraud accessed such protected computers without
13
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 14 of 16
authorization and obtained information from such computers, which Defendants used to further
the fraud and obtain something of value (18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(4)).
61.
Defendants’ conduct has caused, and continues to cause, significant and
irreparable damages and loss to Elsevier.
62.
Defendants’ conduct has caused a loss to Elsevier during a one-year period
aggregating at least $5,000.
63.
As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to
suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
64.
Elsevier seeks injunctive relief, as well as costs and damages in an amount to be
proven at trial.
PRAYER FOR RELIEF
WHEREFORE, Elsevier respectfully requests that the Court:
A. Enter preliminary and permanent injunctions, enjoining and prohibiting Defendants,
their officers, directors, principals, agents, servants, employees, successors and
assigns, and all persons and entities in active concert or participation with them, from
engaging in any of the activity complained of herein or from causing any of the injury
complained of herein and from assisting, aiding, or abetting any other person or
business entity in engaging in or performing any of the activity complained of herein
or from causing any of the injury complained of herein;
B. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, those in privity with Defendants and
those with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, Web
Hosting and Internet Service Providers, domain-name registrars, and domain name
14
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 15 of 16
registries or their administrators that are provided with notice of the injunction, cease
facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendants
engage in any of the activity complained of herein;
C. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, those organizations which have
registered Defendants’ domain names on behalf of Defendants shall disclose
immediately to Plaintiffs all information in their possession concerning the identity of
the operator or registrant of such domain names and of any bank accounts or financial
accounts owned or used by such operator or registrant;
D. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, the TLD Registries for the Defendants’
websites, or their administrators, shall place the domain names on
registryHold/serverHold as well as serverUpdate, ServerDelete, and serverTransfer
prohibited statuses, for the remainder of the registration period for any such website.
E. Enter an order canceling or deleting, or, at Elsevier’s election, transferring the domain
name registrations used by Defendants to engage in the activity complained of herein
to Elsevier’s control so that they may no longer be used for illegal purposes;
F. Enter an order awarding Elsevier its actual damages incurred as a result of
Defendants’ infringement of Elsevier’s copyright rights in the Works and all profits
Defendant realized as a result of its acts of infringement, in amounts to be determined
at trial; or in the alternative, awarding Elsevier, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 504, statutory
damages for the acts of infringement committed by Defendants, enhanced to reflect
the willful nature of the Defendants’ infringement;
G. Enter an order disgorging Defendants’ profits;
15
Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 16 of 16
Sekulic
Legal Hacking and Space
2015
# Legal hacking and space
## What can urban commons learn from the free software hackers?
There is now a need to readdress urban commons through the lens of the digital
commons, writes Dubravka Sekulic. The lessons to be drawn from the free
software community and its resistance to the enclosure of code will likely
prove particularly valuable where participation and regulation are concerned.
> Commons are a particular type of institutional arrangement for governing the
use and disposition of resources. Their salient characteristic, which defines
them in contradistinction to property, is that no single person has exclusive
control over the use and disposition of any particular resource. Instead,
resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some
(more or less defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from
"anything goes" to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are effectively
enforced.
> (Benkler 2003: 6)
The above definition of commons, from the seminal paper "The political economy
of commons" by Yochai Benkler, addresses any type of commons, whether analogue
or digital. In fact, the concept of commons entered the digital realm from
physical space in order to interpret the type of communities, relationships
and production that started to appear with the development of the free as
opposed to the proprietary. Peter Linebaugh charted in his excellent book
_Magna Carta Manifesto_ , how the creation and development of the concept of
commons were closely connected to constantly changing relationships of people
and communities to the physical space. Here, I argue that the concept was
enriched when it was implemented in the digital field. Readdressing urban
space through the lens of digital commons can enable another imagination and
knowledge to appear around urban commons.
[](http://www.derive.at/)The
notion of commons in (urban) space is often complicated by archaic models of
organization and management - "the pasture we knew how to share". There is a
tendency to give the impression that the solution is in reverting to the past
models. In the realm of digital though, there is no "pasture" from the Middle
Ages to fall back on. Digital commons had to start from scratch and define its
own protocols of production and reproduction (caring and sharing). Therefore,
the digital commons and free software community can be the one to turn to, not
only for inspiration and advice, but also as a partner when addressing
questions of urban commons. Or, as Marcell Mars would put it "if we could
start again with (regulating and defining) land, knowing what we know now
about digital networks, we could come up with something much better and
appropriate for today's world. That property wouldn't be private, maybe not
even property, but something else. Only then can we say we have learned
something from the digital" (2013).
## Enclosure as the trigger for action
The moment we turn to commons in relation to (urban) space is the moment in
which the pressure to privatize public space and to commodify every aspect of
urban life has become so strong that it can be argued that it mirrors a moment
in which Magna Carta Libertatum was introduced to protect the basic
reproduction of life for those whose sustenance was connected to the common
pastures and forests of England in the thirteenth century. At the end of the
twentieth century, urban space became the ultimate commodity, and increasing
privatization not only endangered the reproduction of everyday life in the
city; the rent extraction through privatized public space and housing
endangered bare life itself. Additionally, the cities' continuous
privatization of its amenities transformed almost every action in the city, no
matter how mundane - as for example, drinking a glass of water from a tap -,
into an action that creates profit for some private entity and extracts it
from the community. Thus every activity became labour, which a citizen-worker
is not only alienated from, but also unaware of. David Harvey's statement
about the city replacing the factory as a site of class war seems to be not
only an apt description of the condition of life in the city, but also a cry
for action.
When Richard Stallman turned to the foundational gesture of the creation of
free software, GNU/GPL (General Public Licence) was his reaction to the
artificially imposed logic of scarcity on the world of code - and the
increasing and systematic enclosure that took place in the late 1970s and
1980s as "a tidal wave of commercialization transformed software from a
technical object into a commodity, to be bought and sold on the open market
under the alleged protection of intellectual property law" (Coleman 2012:
138). Stallman, who worked as a researcher at MIT's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, detected how "[m]any programmers are unhappy about the
commercialization of system software. It may enable them to make more money,
but it requires them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general
rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among
programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically
used essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends. The purchaser
of software must choose between friendship and obeying the law. Naturally,
many decide that friendship is more important. But those who believe in law
often do not feel at ease with either choice. They become cynical and think
that programming is just a way of making money" (Stallman 2002: 32).
In the period between 1980 and 1984, "one man [Stallman] envisioned a crusade
to change the situation" (Moglen 1999). Stallman understood that in order to
subvert the system, he would have to intervene in the protocols that regulate
the conditions under which the code is produced, and not the code itself;
although he did contribute some of the best lines of code into the compiler
and text editor - the foundational infrastructure for any development. The
gesture that enabled the creation of a free software community that yielded
the complex field of digital commons was not a perfect line of code. The
creation of GNU General Public License (GPL) was a legal hack to counteract
the imposing of intellectual property law on code. At that time, the only
license available for programmers wanting to keep the code free was public
domain, which gave no protection against the code being appropriated and
closed. GPL enabled free codes to become self-perpetuating. Everything built
using a free code had to be made available under the same condition, in order
to secure the freedom for programmers to continue sharing and not breaking the
law. "By working on and using GNU rather than proprietary programs, we can be
hospitable to everyone and obey the law. In addition, GNU serves as an example
to inspire and as a banner to rally others to join in sharing. This can give
us a feeling of harmony, which is impossible if we use software, which is not
free. For about half the programmers I talk to, this is an important happiness
that money cannot replace" (Stallman 2002: 33).
Architects and planners as well as environmental designers have for too long
believed the opposite, that a good enough design can subvert the logic of
enclosure that dominates the production and reproduction of space; that a good
enough design can keep space open and public by the sheer strength of spatial
intervention. Stallman rightfully understands that no design is strong enough
to keep private ownership from claiming what it believes belongs to it.
Digital and urban commons, despite operating in completely different realms
and economies, are under attack from the same threat of "market processes"
that "crucially depend upon the individual monopoly of capitalists (of all
sorts) over ownership of the means of production, including finance and land.
All rent, recall, is a return to the monopoly power of private ownership of
some crucial asset, such as land or a patent. The monopoly power of private
property is therefore both the beginning-point and the end-point of all
capitalist activity" (Harvey 2012: 100). Stallman envisioned a bleak future
(2003: 26-28) but found a way to "relate the means to the ends". He understood
that the emancipatory task of a struggle "is not only what has to be done, but
also how it will be done and who will do it" (Stavrides & De Angelis: 7).
Thus, to produce the necessary requirements - both for a community to emerge,
but also for the basis of future protocols - tools and methodologies are
needed for the community to create both free software and itself.
## Renegotiating (undoing) property, hacking the law, creating community
Property, as an instrument of allocation of resources, is a right that is
negotiated within society and by society and not written in stone or given as
such. The digital, more than any other field, discloses property as being
inappropriate for contemporary relationships between production and
reproduction and, additionally, proves how it is possible to fundamentally
rethink it. The digital offers this possibility as it is non-material, non-
rival and non-exclusive (Meretz 2013), unlike anything in the physical world.
And Elinor Ostrom's lifelong empirical researches give ground to the belief
that eschewing property, being the sole instrument of allocation, can work as
a tool of management even for rival, excludable goods.
The value of information in digital form is not flat, but property is not the
way to protect that value, as the music industry realized during the course of
the last ten years. Once the copy is _out there_ , the cost of protecting its
exclusivity on the grounds of property becomes too high in relation to the
potential value to be extracted. For example, the value is extracted from
information through controlling the moment of its release and not through
subsequent exploitation. Stallman decided to tackle the imposition of the
concept of property on computer code (and by extension to the digital realm as
a whole) by articulating it in another field: just as property is the product
of constant negotiations within a society, so are legal regulations. After
some time, he was joined by "[m]any free software developers [who] do not
consider intellectual property instruments as the pivotal stimulus for a
marketplace of ideas and knowledge. Instead, they see them as a form of
restriction so fundamental (or poorly executed) that they need to be
counteracted through alternative legal agreements that treat knowledge,
inventions, and other creative expressions not as property but rather as
speech to be freely shared, circulated, and modified" (Coleman 2012: 26).
The digital sphere can give a valid example of how renegotiating regulation
can transform a resource from scarce to abundant. When the change from
analogue signal to packet switching begun to take effect, the distribution of
finite territory and the way the radio frequency spectrum was managed got
renegotiated and the amount of slots of space to be allocated grew by an order
of magnitude while the absolute size of the spectrum stayed the same. This
shift enabled Brecht's dream of a two-sided radio to become reality, thus
enabling what he had suggested: "change this apparatus over from distribution
to communication".1
According to Lawrence Lessig, what regulates behavior in cyberspace is an
interdependence of four constraints: market, law, architecture and norms
(Lessig 2012: 121-25). Analogously, space can be put in place of cyberspace,
as the regulation of space is the sum of these four constraints. These four
constraints are in a dynamic relationship in which the balance can be tilted
towards one, depending on how much each of these categories puts pressure on
the other three. Changes in any one reflect the regulation of the whole.
"Architecture" in Lessig's theory should be understood broadly as the "built
environment" that regulates behaviour in (cyber)space. In the last few decades
we have experienced the domination of the market reconfiguring the basis of
norms, law and architecture. In order to counteract this, the other three
constraints need to be re-negotiated. In digital space, this reconfiguration
happened by declaring the code - that is, the set of instructions written as
highly formalized text in a specific programming language to be executed
(usually) by the computer - to be considered as speech in front of the law,
and by hacking the law in order to disrupt the way that property relationships
are formed.
To put it simply, in order to create a change in dynamics between the
architecture, norms and the market, the law had to be addressed first. This is
not a novel procedure, "legal hacking is going on all the time, it is just
that politics is doing it under the veil of legality because they are the
parliament, they are Microsoft, which can hire a whole law firm to defend them
and find all the legal loopholes. Legal hacking is the norm actually" (Bailey
2013). When it comes to physical space, one of the most obvious examples of
the reconfiguration of regulations under the influence of the market is to
create legal provisions, norms and architecture to sustain the concept of
developing (and privatizing) public space through public-private partnerships.
The decision of the Italian parliament that the privatization of services
(specifically of water management) is legal and does not obstruct one's access
to water as a human right, is another example of a crude manipulation of the
law by the state in favour of the market. Unlike legal hacks by corporations
that aim to create a favourable legal climate for another round of
accumulation through dispossession, Stallman's hack tries to limit the impact
of the market and to create a space of freedom for the creation of a code and
of sharable knowledge, by questioning one of the central pillars of liberal
jurisprudence: (intellectual) property law.
Similarly, translated into physical space, one of the initiatives in Europe
that comes closest to creating a real existing urban commons, Teatro Valle
Occupato in Rome, is doing the same, "pushing the borders of legality of
private property" by legally hacking the institution of a foundation to "serve
a public, or common, purpose" and having "notarized [a] document registered
with the Italian state, that creates a precedent for other people to follow in
its way" (Bailey 2013). Sounds familiar to Stallman's hack as the fundamental
gesture by which community and the whole eco-system can be formed.
It is obvious that, in order to create and sustain that type of legal hack, it
is a necessity to have a certain level of awareness and knowledge of how
systems, both political and legal, work, i.e. to be politically literate.
"While in general", says Italian commons-activist and legal scholar Saki
Bailey, "we've become extremely lazy [when it comes to politics]. We've
started to become a kind of society of people who give up their responsibility
to participate by handing it over to some charismatic leaders, experts of [a]
different type" (2013). Free software hackers, in order to understand and take
part in a constant negotiation that takes place on a legal level between the
market that seeks to cloister the code and hackers who want to keep it free,
had to become literate in an arcane legal language. Gabriella Coleman notes in
_Coding Freedom_ that hacker forums sometimes tend to produce legal analysis
that is just as serious as one would expect to find in a law office. Like the
occupants of Teatro Valle, free software hackers understand the importance of
devoting time and energy to understand constraints and to find ways to
structurally divert them.
This type of knowledge is not shared and created in isolation, but in
socialization, in discussions in physical or cyber spaces (such as #irc chat
rooms, forums, mailing lists…), the same way free software hackers share their
knowledge about code. Through this process of socializing knowledge, "the
community is formed, developed, and reproduced through practices focused on
common space. To generalize this principle: the community is developed through
commoning, through acts and forms of organization oriented towards the
production of the common" (Stavrides 2012: 588). Thus forming a community is
another crucial element of the creation of digital commons, but even more
important are its development and resilience. The emerging community was not
given something to manage, it created something together, and together devised
rules of self-regulation and decision-making.
The prime example of this principle in the free software community is the
Debian Project, formed around the development of the Debian Linux
distribution. It is a volunteer organization consisting of around 3,000
developers that since its inception in 1993 has defined a set of basic
principles by which the project and its members conduct their affairs. This
includes the introduction of new people into the community, a process called
Debian Social Contract (DSC). A special part of the DSC defines the criteria
for "free software", thus regulating technical aspects of the project and also
technical relations with the rest of a free software community. The Debian
Constitution, another document created by the community so it can govern
itself, describes the organizational structure for formal decision-making
within the project.
Another example is Wikipedia, where the community that makes the online
encyclopedia also takes part in creating regulations, with some aspects
debated almost endlessly on forums. It is even possible to detect a loose
community of "Internet users" who took to the streets all over the world when
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to
Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) threatened to
enclose the Internet, as we know it; the proposed legislation was successfully
contested.
Free software projects that represent the core of the digital commons are most
of the time born of the initiative of individuals, but their growth and life
cycle depend on the fact that they get picked up by a community or generate
community around them that is allowed to take part in their regulation and in
decisions about which shape and forms the project will take in the future.
This is an important lesson to be transferred to the physical space in which
many projects fail because they do not get picked up by the intended
community, as the community is not offered a chance to partake in its creation
and, more importantly, its regulation.
## Building common infrastructure and institutions
"The expansion of intellectual property law" as the main vehicle of the trend
to enclose the code that leads to the act of the creation of free software
and, thus, digital commons, "is part and parcel of a broader neoliberal trend
to privatize what was once under public or under the state's aegis, such as
health provision, water delivery, and military services" (Coleman 2012: 16).
The structural fight headed by the GNU/GPL against the enclosure of code
"defines the contractual relationship that serves to secure the freedom of
means of production and to constitute a community of those participating in
the production and reproduction of free resources. And it is this constitutive
character, as an answer to an every time singular situation of appropriation
by the capital, that is a genuine political emancipation striving for an equal
and free collective production" (Mars & Medak 2004). Thus digital commons "is
based on the _communication_ among _singularities_ and emerges through
collaborative social processes of production " (Negri & Hardt 2005: 204).
The most important lesson urban commons can take from its digital counterpart
is at the same time the most difficult one: how to make a structural hack in
the moment of the creation of an urban commons that will enable it to become
structurally self-perpetuating, thus creating fertile ground not only for a
singular spatialization of urban commons to appear, but to multiply and create
a whole new eco-system. Digital commons was the first field in which what
Negri and Hardt (2009: 3-21) called the "republic of property" was challenged.
Urban commons, in order to really emerge as a spatialization of a new type of
relationship, need to start undoing property as well in order to socially re-
appropriate the city. Or in the words of Stavros Stavrides "the most urgent
and promising task, which can oppose the dominant governance model, is the
reinvention of common space. The realm of the common emerges in a constant
confrontation with state-controlled 'authorized' public space. This is an
emergence full of contradictions, perhaps, quite difficult to predict, but
nevertheless necessary. Behind a multifarious demand for justice and dignity,
new roads to collective emancipation are tested and invented. And, as the
Zapatistas say, we can create these roads only while walking. But we have to
listen, to observe, and to feel the walking movement. Together" (Stavrides
2012: 594).
The big task for both digital and urban commons is "[b]uilding a core common
infrastructure [which] is a necessary precondition to allow us to transition
away from a society of passive consumers buying what a small number of
commercial producers are selling. It will allow us to develop into a society
in which all can speak to all, and in which anyone can become an active
participant in political, social and cultural discourse" (Benkler 2003: 9).
This core common infrastructure has to be porous enough to include people that
are not similar, to provide "a ground to build a public realm and give
opportunities for discussing and negotiating what is good for all, rather than
the idea of strengthening communities in their struggle to define their own
commons. Relating commons to groups of "similar" people bears the danger of
eventually creating closed communities. People may thus define themselves as
commoners by excluding others from their milieu, from their own privileged
commons." (Stavrides 2010). If learning carefully from digital commons, urban
commons need to be conceptualized on the basis of the public, with a self-
regulating community that is open for others to join. That socializes
knowledge and thus produces and reproduces the commons, creating a space for
political emancipation that is capable of judicial arguments for the
protection and extension of regulations that are counter-market oriented.
## References
Bailey, Saki (2013): Interview by Dubravka Sekulic and Alexander de Cuveland.
Benkler, Yochai (2003): "The political economy of commons". _Upgrade_ IV, no.
3, 6-9, [www.benkler.org/Upgrade-
Novatica%20Commons.pdf](http://www.benkler.org/Upgrade-
Novatica%20Commons.pdf).
Benkler, Yochai (2006): _The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom_. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Brecht, Bertolt (2000): "The radio as a communications apparatus". In: _Brecht
on Film and Radio_ , edited by Marc Silberman. Methuen, 41-6.
Coleman, E. Gabriella (2012): _Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Hacking_. Princeton University Press / Kindle edition.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2005): _Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire_. Penguin Books.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2011): _Commonwealth_. Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David (2012): The Art of Rent. In: _Rebel Cities: From the Right to
the City to the Urban Revolution_ , 1st ed. Verso, 94-118.
Hill, Benjamin Mako (2012): Freedom for Users, Not for Software. In: Bollier,
David & Helfrich, Silke (Ed.): _The Wealth of the Commons: a World Beyond
Market and State_. Levellers Press / E-book.
Lessig, Lawrence (2012): _Code: Version 2.0_. Basic Books.
Linebaugh, Peter (2008): _The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for
All_. University of California Press.
Mars, Marcell (2013): Interview by Dubravka Sekulic.
Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak (2004): "Both devil and gnu",
[www.desk.org:8080/ASU2/newsletter.Zarez.N5M.MedakRomicTXT.EnGlish](http://www.desk.org:8080/ASU2/newsletter.Zarez.N5M.MedakRomicTXT.EnGlish).
Martin, Reinhold (2013): "Public and common(s): Places: Design observer",
[placesjournal.org/article/public-and-
commons](https://placesjournal.org/article/public-and-commons).
Meretz, Stefan (2010): "Commons in a taxonomy of goods", [keimform.de/2010
/commons-in-a-taxonomy-of-goods](http://keimform.de/2010/commons-in-a
-taxonomy-of-goods/).
Moglen, Eben (1999): "Anarchism triumphant: Free software and the death of
copyright", First Monday,
[firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594](http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594).
Stallman, Richard and Joshua Gay (2002): _Free Software, Free Society:
Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman_. GNU Press.
Stallman, Richard and Joshua Gay (2003): "The Right to Read". _Upgrade_ IV,
no. 3, 26-8.
Stavrides, Stavros (2013): "Contested urban rhythms: From the industrial city
to the post-industrial urban archipelago". _The Sociological Review_ 61,
34-50.
Stavrides, Stavros, and Massimo De Angelis (2010): "On the commons: A public
interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides". _e-flux_ 17, 1-17,
[www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-
angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/](http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a
-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/).
1
"[...] radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus
for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion:
change this apparatus over from distribution to communication". See "The radio
as a communications apparatus", Brecht 2000.
Published 4 November 2015
Original in English
First published by derive 61 (2015)