»Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of
Knowledge Production«
Exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2014
**The present-day social model of authorship is co-substantive with the
normative regime of copyright. Copyright’s avowed role is to triangulate a
balance between the rights of authors, cultural industries, and the public.
Its legal foundation is in the natural right of the author over the products
of intellectual labor. The recurrent claims of the death of the author,
disputing the primacy of the author over the work, have failed to do much to
displace the dominant understanding of the artwork as an extension of the
personality of the author.**
The structuralist criticism positing an impersonal structuring structure
within which the work operates; the hypertexual criticism dissolving
boundaries of work in the arborescent web of referentiality; or the remix
culture’s hypostatisation of the collective and re-appropriative nature of all
creativity – while changing the meaning we ascribe to the works of culture –
have all failed to leave an impact on how the production of works is
normativized and regulated.
And yet the nexus author–work–copyright has transformed in fundamental ways,
however in ways opposite to what these openings in our social epistemology
have suggested. The figure of the creator, with the attendant apotheosis of
individual creativity and originality, is nowadays more forcefully than ever
before being mobilized and animated by the efforts to expand the exclusive
realm of exploitation of the work under copyright. The forcefulness though
speaks of a deep-seated neurosis, intimating that the purported balance might
not be what it is claimed to be by the copyright advocates. Much is revealed
as we descend into the hidden abode of production.
## _Of Copyright and Authorship_
Copyright has principally an economic function: to unambiguously establish
individualized property in the products of intellectual labor. Once the legal
title is unambiguously assigned, there is a property holder with whose consent
the contracting, commodification, and marketing of the work can proceed. In
that aspect, copyright is not very different from the requirement of formal
freedom that is granted to the laborer to contract out their own labor power
as a commodity to capital, allowing then the capital to maximize the
productivity and appropriate the products of the worker’s labor – which is in
terms of Marx »dead labor.« In fact, the analogy between the contracting of
labor force and the contracting of intellectual work does not stop there. They
also share a common history.
The liberalism of rights and the commodification of labor have emerged from
the context of waning absolutism and incipient capitalism in Europe of the
seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Before the publishers and authors
could have their monopoly over the exploitation of their publications
instituted in the form of copyright, they had to obtain a privilege to print a
book from royal censors. First printing privileges granted to publishers, for
instance in early seventeenth century Great Britain, came with the burden
placed on publishers to facilitate censorship and control over the
dissemination of the growing body of printed matter in the aftermath of the
invention of movable type printing.
The evolution of regulatory mechanisms of contemporary copyright from the
context of absolutism and early capitalism receives its full relief if one
considers how peer review emerged as a self-censoring mechanism within the
Royal Academy and the Académie des sciences. [1] The internal peer review
process helped the academies maintain the privilege to print the works of
their members, which was given to them only under the condition that the works
they publish limit themselves to matters of science and make no political
statements that could otherwise sour the benevolence of the monarch. Once they
expanded to print in their almanacs, journals, and books the works of authors
outside of the academy ranks, they both expanded their scientific authority
and their regulating function to the entire nascent field of modern science.
The transition from the privilege tied to the publisher to the privilege tied
to the natural person of the author would unfold only later. In Great Britain
this occurred as the guild of printers, Stationers’ Company, failed to secure
the extension of its printing privilege and thus, in order to continue with
the business of printing books, decided to advocate a copyright for the
authors instead, which resulted in the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709,
also known as the Statute of Anne. Thus the author became the central figure
in the regulation of literary and scientific production. Not only did the
author now receive the exclusive rights to the work, the author was also made
– as Foucault has famously analyzed – the identifiable subject of scrutiny,
censorship, and political sanction by the absolutist state or the church.
And yet, although the romantic author now took center stage, copyright
regulation, the economic compensation for the work, would long remain no more
than an honorary one. Until well into the eighteenth century literary writing
and creativity in general were regarded as resulting from the divine
inspiration and not from the individual genius of the author. Money earned in
the growing business with books mostly stayed in the hands of the publishers,
while the author received an honorarium, a flat sum that served as a »token of
esteem.« [2] It was only with the increasingly vocal demand by the authors to
secure material and political independence from the patronage and authority
that they started to make claims for rightful remuneration.
## _Of Compensation and Exploitation
_
The moment of full-blown affirmation of romantic author-function marks a
historic moment of redistribution and establishment of compromise between the
right of publishers to economic exploitation of the works and the right of
authors to rightful compensation for their works. Economically this was made
possible by the expanding market for printed books in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth century, while politically this was catalyzed by the growing desire
for autonomy of scientific and literary production from the system of feudal
patronage and censorship in gradually liberalizing modern capitalist
societies. The autonomy of production was substantially coupled to the
production for the market. However, the irenic balance could not last
unobstructed. Once the production of culture and science was subsumed under
the exigencies of the market, it had to follow the laws of commodification and
competition that no commodity production can escape.
With the development of big corporation and monopoly capitalism, [3] the
purported balance between the author and the publisher, the innovator or
scientist and the company, the labor and the capital, the public circulation
and the pressures of monetization has become unhinged. While the legislative
expansions of protections, court decisions, and multilateral treaties are
legitimated on basis of the rights of creators, they have become the economic
basis for the monopolies dominating the commanding heights of the global
economy to protect their dominant position in the world market. The levels of
concentration in the industries with large portfolios of various forms of
intellectual property rights is staggering. The film industry is a US$88
billion industry dominated by six major studios. The recorded music industry
is an almost US$20 billion industry dominated by three major labels. The
publishing industry is a US$120 billion industry, where the leading ten earn
in revenues more than the next 40 largest publishing groups. Among patent
holding industries, the situation is a little more diversified, but big patent
portfolios in general dictate the dynamics of market power.
Academic publishing in particular draws a stark relief of the state of play.
It is a US$10 billion industry dominated by five publishers, financed up to
75% from the subscriptions of libraries. It is notorious for achieving extreme
year on year profit margins – in the case of Reed Elsevier regularly well over
20%, with Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell only just lagging
behind. [4] Given that the work of contributing authors is not paid, but
financed by their institutions (provided they are employed at an institution)
and that the publications nowadays come mostly in the form of electronic
articles licensed under subscription for temporary use to libraries and no
longer sold as printed copies, the public interest could be served at a much
lower cost by leaving commercial closed-access publishers out of the equation.
However, given the entrenched position of these publishers and their control
over the moral economy of reputation in academia, the public disservice that
they do cannot be addressed within the historic ambit of copyright. It
requires politicization.
## _Of Law and Politics_
When we look back on the history of copyright, before there was legality there
was legitimacy. In the context of an almost completely naturalized and
harmonized global regulation of copyright the political question of legitimacy
seems to be no longer on the table. An illegal copy is an object of exchange
that unsettles the existing economies of cultural production. And yet,
copyright nowadays marks a production model that serves the power of
appropriation from the author and market power of the publishers much more
than the labor of cultural producers. Hence the illegal copy is again an
object begging the question as to what do we do at a rare juncture when a
historic opening presents itself to reorganize how a good, such as knowledge
and culture, is produced and distributed in a society. We are at such a
juncture, a juncture where the regime regulating legality and illegality might
be opened to the questioning of its legitimacy or illegitimacy.
1. Jump Up For a more detailed account of this development, as well as for the history of printing privilege in Great Britain, see Mario Biagioli: »From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review,« in: _Emergences:_ _Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures _12, no. 1 [2002], pp. 11–45.
2. Jump Up The transition of authorship from honorific to professional is traced back in Martha Woodmansee: _The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics_. New York 1996.
3. Jump Up When referencing monopoly markets, we do not imply purely monopolistic markets, where one company is the only enterprise selling a product, but rather markets where a small number of companies hold most of the market. In monopolistic competition, oligopolies profit from not competing on prices. Rather »all the main players are large enough to survive a price war, and all it would do is shrink the size of the industry revenue pie that the firms are fighting over. Indeed, the price in an oligopolistic industry will tend to gravitate toward what it would be in a pure monopoly, so the contenders are fighting for slices of the largest possible revenue pie.« Robert W. McChesney: _Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy_. New York 2013, pp. 37f. The immediate effect of monopolistic competition in culture is that the consumption is shaped to conform to the needs of the large enterprise, i.e. to accommodate the economies of scale, narrowing the range of styles, expressions, and artists published and promoted in the public.
4. Jump Up Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon: »The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,« in: _PLoS ONE_ 10, no. 6 [June 2015]: e0127502, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.
Tomislav Medak is a philosopher with interests in contemporary political
philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is coordinating the theory program
and publishing activities of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Zagreb/Croatia),
and works in parallel with the Zagreb-based theatre collective BADco.
Hamerman
Pirate Libraries and the Fight for Open Information
2015
| | SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2015 | A BI-WEEKLY WEBPAPER | ISSUE 61
|
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PIRATE LIBRARIES and the fight for open information
/ by _Sarah Hamerman_ |
In a digital era that destabilizes traditional notions of intellectual
property, cultural producers must rethink information access.
Over the last several years, a number of _pirate libraries_ have done just
that. Collaboratively run digital libraries such as
[_Aaaaaarg_](http://aaaaarg.fail/),
_[Monoskop](http://www.monoskop.org/Monoskop)_ , _[Public
Library](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/)_ , and
_[UbuWeb_](http://www.ubuweb.tv/) have emerged, offering access to humanities
texts and audiovisual resources that are technically ‘pirated’ and often hard
to find elsewhere.
Though these sites differ somewhat in content, architecture, and ideological
bent, all of them disavow intellectual copyright law to varying degrees,
offering up pirated books and media with the aim of advancing information
access.
“Information wants to be free,” has served as a catchphrase in recent internet
activism, calling for information democracy, led by media, library and
information advocates.
As online information access is increasingly embedded within the networks of
capital, the digital text-sharing underground actualizes the Internet’s
potential to build a true information commons.
With such projects, the archive becomes a record of collective power, not
corporate or state power; the digital book becomes unlocked, linkable, and
shareable.
Still, these sites comprise but a small subset of the networks of peer-to-peer
file sharing. Many legal battles waged over the explosion of audiovisual file
sharing through p2p services such as Napster, BitTorrent and MediaFire. At its
peak, Napster boasted over 80 million users; the p2p music-sharing service was
shut down after a high-profile lawsuit by the RIAA in 2001.
The US Department of Justice brought charges against open access activist
_[Aaron Swartz](http://www.fvckthemedia.com/issue51/editorial)_ in 2011 for
his large-scale unauthorized downloading of files from the JStor Academic
database. Swartz, who sadly committed suicide before his trial, was an
organizer for Demand Progress, a campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act,
which was defeated in 2012. Swartz’s actions and the fight around SOPA
represent a benchmark in the struggle for open-access and anti-copyright
practices surrounding the digital book.
Aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb and Public Library are representative cases of the
pirate library because of their explicit engagement with archival form, their
embrace of ideas of the _[digital commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Commons)_ within current left-leaning thought, and their like-minded focus on critical theory and the arts.
All of these projects lend themselves to be considered _as libraries_ ,
retooled for open digital networks.
_Aaaaaarg.org_ , started by Los Angeles based artist Sean Dockray, hosts
full-text pdfs of over 50,000 books and articles. The library is connected to a an
alternative education project called the Public School, which serves as a
platform for self-organizing lectures, workshops and projects in cities across
the globe. _Aaaaaarg_ ’s catalog is viewable by the public, but
upload/download privileges are restricted through an invite system, thus
circumventing copyright law.
The site is divided into a “Library,” in which users can search for texts by
author; “Collections,” or user-generated grouping of texts designed for
reading groups or research interests; and “Discussions,” a message board where
participants can request texts and volunteer for working groups. Most
recently, _Aaaaaarg_ has introduced a “compiler” tool that allows readers to
select excerpts from longer texts and assemble them into new PDFs, and a
reading tool that allows readers to save reference points and insert comments
into texts. Though the library is easily searchable, it doesn’t maintain
high-quality _[metadata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata)_. Dockray and
other organizers intend to preserve a certain subjective and informal quality,
focusing more on discussion and collaboration than correct preservation and
classification practice.
_Aaaaaarg_ has been threatened with takedowns a few times, but has survived by
creating mirrored sites and reconstituted itself by varying the number of A’s
in the URL. Its shifts in location, organization, and capabilities reflect
both the decentralized, ad-hoc nature of its maintenance and the organizers’
attempts to elude copyright regulations. Text-sharing sites such as _Aaaaaarg_
have also been referred to as _[shadow
libraries_](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/),
reflecting their quasi-covert status and their efforts to evade shutdown.
Monoskop.org, a project founded by media artist _[Dušan
Barok](http://monoskop.org/Du%C5%A1an_Barok)_ , is a wiki for collaborative
studies of art, media and the humanities that was born in 2004 out of Barok’s
study of media art and related cultural practices. Its significant holdings -
about 3,000 full-length texts and many more excerpts, links and citations -
include avant-garde and modernist magazines, writings on sound art, scanned
illustrations, and media theory texts.
As a wiki, any user can edit any article or upload content, and see their
changes reflected immediately. Monoskop is comprised of two sister sites: the
Monoskop wiki and Monoskop Log, the accompanying text repository. Monoskop Log
is structured as a Wordpress site with links hosted on third-party sites, much
like the rare-music download blogs that became popular in the mid-2000s.
Though this architecture is relatively unstable, links are fixed on-demand and
site mirroring and redundancy balance out some of the instability.
Monoskop makes clear that it is offering content under the fair-use doctrine
and that this content is for personal and scholarly use, not commercial use.
Barok notes that though there have been a small number of takedowns, people
generally appreciate unrestricted access to the types of materials in Monoskop
log, whether they are authors or publishers.
_Public Library_ , a somewhat newer pirate library founded by Croatian
Internet activist and researcher Marcell Mars and his collaborators, currently
offers a collection of about 6,300 texts. The project frames itself through a
utopian philosophy of building a truly universal library, radically extending
enlightenment-era conceptions of democracy. Through democratizing the _tools
of librarianship_ – book scanning, classification systems, cataloging,
information – it promises a broader, de-institutionalized public library.
In __[Public Library: An
Essay](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/27/public-library-an-essay/#sdendnote19sym)__ , Public Library’s organizers frame p2p libraries as
“fragile knowledge infrastructures built and maintained by brave librarians
practicing civil disobedience which the world of researchers in the humanities
rely on.” This civil disobedience is a politically motivated refutation of
intellectual property law and the orientation of information networks toward
venture capital and advertising. While the pirate libraries fulfill this
dissident function as a kind of experimental provocation, their content is
audience-specific rather than universal.
_[UbuWeb](http://www.ubuweb.com/resources/index.html)_ , founded in 1996 by
conceptual artist/ writer Kenneth Goldsmith, is the largest online archive of
avant-garde art resources. Its holdings include sound, video and text-based
works dating from the historical avant-garde era to today. While many of the
sites in the “pirate library” continuum source their content through
community-based or peer-to-peer models, UbuWeb focuses on making available out
of print, obscure or difficult to access artistic media, stating that
uploading such historical artifacts doesn’t detract from the physical value of
the work; rather, it enhances it. The website’s philosophy blends the utopian
ideals of avant-garde concrete poetry with the ideals of the digital gift
economy, and it has specifically refused to accept corporate or foundation
funding or adopt a more market-oriented business model.
**Pirate Libraries vs. “The Sharing Economy”**
In pirate libraries, information users become archive builders by uploading
often-copyrighted content to shared networks.
Within the so-called “ _[sharing
economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy)_ ,” users essentially
lease e-book content from information corporations such as Amazon, which
markets both the Kindle as platform. This centralization of intellectual
property has dire impacts on the openness of the digital book as a
collaborative knowledge-sharing device.
In contrast, the pirate library actualizes a gift economy based on qualitative
and communal rather than monetized exchange. As Mackenzie Wark writes in _A
Hacker Manifesto_ (2004), “The gift is marginal, but nevertheless plays a
vital role in cementing reciprocal and communal relations among people who
otherwise can only confront each other as buyers and sellers of commodities.”
From theorizing new media art to building solidarity against repressive
regimes, such communal information networks can crucially articulate shared
bodies of political and aesthetic desire and meaning. According to author
Matthew Stadler, literature is by nature communal. “Literature is not owned,”
he writes. “It is, by definition, a space of mutually negotiated meanings that
never closes or concludes, a space that thrives on — indeed requires — open
access and sharing.”
In a roundtable discussion published in _New Formations_ , _Aaaaaarg_ founder
Sean Dockray remarks that the site “actively explored and exploited the
affordances of asynchronous, networked communication,” functioning upon the
logic of the hack. Dockray continues: “But all of this is rather commonplace
for what’s called ‘piracy,’ isn’t it?” Pirate librarianship can be thought of
as a practice of civil disobedience within the stringent information
environment of today.
These projects promise both the realization and destruction of the public
library. They promote information democracy while calling the _professional_
institution of the Library into question, allowing amateurs to upload,
catalog, lend and maintain collections. In _Public Library: An Essay_ , Public
Library’s organizers _[write](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/27
/public-library-an-essay/)_ : “With the emergence of the internet…
librarianship has been given an opportunity… to include thousands of amateur
librarians who will, together with the experts, build a distributed peer-to-peer network to care for the catalog of available knowledge.”
Public Library frames amateur librarianship as a free, collaboratively
maintained and democratic activity, drawing upon the language of the French
Revolution and extending it for the 21st century. While these practices are
democratic in form, they are not necessarily democratic in the populist sense;
rather, they focus on bringing high theoretical discourses to people outside
the academy. Accordingly, they attract a modest but engaged audience of
critics, artists, designers, activists, and scholars.
The activities of Aaaaaarg and Public Library may fall closer to ‘ _[peer
preservation](http://computationalculture.net/article/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation)_ ’
than ‘peer production,’ as the desires to share information
widely and to preserve these collections against shutdown often come into
conflict. In a _[recent piece](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/)_ for e-flux coauthored with Lawrence Liang, Dockray accordingly
laments “the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries have to operate
somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that doesn’t allow
imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques of evasion,
distribution, and redundancy.”
UbuWeb and Monoskop, which digitize rare, out-of-print art texts and media
rather than in-print titles, can be said to fulfill the aims of preservation
and access. UbuWeb and Monoskop are openly used and discussed as classroom
resources and in online arts journalism more frequently than the more
aggressively anti-copyright sources; more on-the-record and mainstream
visibility likely -- but doesn’t necessarily -- equate to wider usage.
**From Alternative Space to Alternative Media**
Aaaaaarg _[locates itself as a
‘scaffolding’](http://chtodelat.org/b9-texts-2/vilensky/materialities-of-independent-publishing-a-conversation-with-aaaaarg-chto-delat-i-cite-mute-and-neural/)_ between institutions, a platform that unfolds between institutional
gaps and fills them in, rather than directly opposing them. Over ten years
after it was founded, it continues to provide a community for “niche”
varieties of political critique.
Drawing upon different strains of ‘alternative networking,’ the digital
text-sharing underground gives a voice to those quieted by the mechanisms of
institutional archives, publishing, and galleries. On the one hand, pirate
libraries extend the logic of alternative art spaces/artist-run spaces that
challenge the “white cube” and the art market; instead, they showcase ways of
making that are often ephemeral, performative, and anti-commercial.
Lawrence Liang refers to projects such as Aaaaaarg as “ _[ludic
libraries](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/)_ ,” as
they encourage a sense of intellectual play that deviates from well-
established norms of utility, seriousness, purpose, and property.
Just as alternative, community-oriented art spaces promote “fringe” art forms,
the pirate libraries build upon open digital architectures to promote “fringe”
scholarship, art, technological and archival practices. Though the comparison
between physical architecture and virtual architecture is a metaphor here, the
impact upon creative communities runs parallel.
At the same time, the digital text-sharing underground builds upon Robert W.
McChesney’s calls in _Digital Disconnect_ for a democratic media system that
promotes the expansion of public, student and community journalism. A truly
heterogeneous media system, for McChesney, would promote a multiplicity of
opinions, supplementing for-profit mass media with a substantial and varied
portion of nonprofit and independent media.
In order to create a political system – and a media system – that reflects
multiple interests, rather than the supposedly neutral status quo, we must
support truly free, not-for-profit alternatives to corporate journalism and
“clickbait” media designed to lure traffic for advertisers. We must support
creative platforms that encourage blending high-academic language with pop-
culture; quantitative analysis with art-making; appropriation with
authenticity: the pirate libraries serve just these purposes.
Pirate libraries help bring about what Gary Hall calls the “unbound book” as
text-form; as he writes, we can perceive such a digital book “as liquid and
living, open to being continually updated and collaboratively written, edited,
annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered,
reiterated and reimagined.” These projects allow us to re-imagine both
archival practices and the digital book for social networks based on the gift.
Aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb, and Public Library build a record of critical and
artistic discourse that is held in common, user-responsive and networkable.
Amateur librarians sustain these projects through technological ‘hacks’ that
innovate upon present archival tools and push digital preservation practices
forward.
Pirate libraries critique the ivory tower’s monopoly over the digital book.
They posit a space where alternative communities can flourish.
Between the cracks of the new information capital, the digital text-sharing
underground fosters the coming-into-being of another kind of information
society, one in which the historical record is the democratically-shared basis
for new forms of knowledge.
From this we should take away the understanding that _piracy is normal_ and
the public domain it builds is abundant. While these practices will continue
just beneath the official surface of the information economy, it is high time
for us to demand that our legal structures catch up.