Tenen & Foxman
Book Piracy as Peer Preservation
2014
Book Piracy as Peer Preservation {#book-piracy-as-peer-preservation .entry-title}
**Abstract**
In describing the people, books, and technologies behind one of the
largest "shadow libraries" in the world, we find a tension between the
dynamics of sharing and preservation. The paper proceeds to
contextualize contemporary book piracy historically, challenging
accepted theories of peer production. Through a close analysis of one
digital library's system architecture, software and community, we assert
that the activities cultivated by its members are closer to that of
conservationists of the public libraries movement, with the goal of
preserving rather than mass distributing their collected material.
Unlike common peer production models emphasis is placed on the expertise
of its members as digital preservations, as well as the absorption of
digital repositories. Additionally, we highlight issues that arise from
their particular form of distributed architecture and community.
>
>
> *Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal.
> That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why
> poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first
> instructors of the people. That is why Shakespeare must be translated
> in France. That is why Molière must be translated in England. That is
> why comments must be made on them. That is why there must be a vast
> public literary domain. That is why all poets, all philosophers, all
> thinkers, all the producers of the greatness of the mind must be
> translated, commented on, published, printed, reprinted, stereotyped,
> distributed, explained, recited, spread abroad, given to all, given
> cheaply, given at cost price, given for nothing.*
> ^[1](#fn-2025-1){#fnref-2025-1}^
**Introduction**
The big money (and the bandwidth) in online media is in film, music, and
software. Text is less profitable for copyright holders; it is cheaper
to duplicate and easier to share. Consequently, issues surrounding the
unsanctioned sharing of print material receive less press and scant
academic attention. The very words, "book piracy," fail to capture the
spirit of what is essentially an Enlightenment-era project, openly
embodied in many contemporary "shadow libraries":^[2](#fn-2025-2){#fnref-2025-2}^
in the words of Victor Hugo, to establish a "vast public
literary domain." Writers, librarians, and political activists from Hugo
to Leo Tolstoy and Andrew Carnegie have long argued for unrestricted
access to information as a form of a public good essential to civic
engagement. In that sense, people participating in online book exchanges
enact a role closer to that of a librarian than that of a bootlegger or
a plagiarist. Whatever the reader's stance on the ethics of copyright
and copyleft, book piracy should not be dismissed as mere search for
free entertainment. Under the conditions of "digital
disruption,"^[3](#fn-2025-3){#fnref-2025-3}^ when the traditional
institutions of knowledge dissemination---the library, the university,
the newspaper, and the publishing house---feel themselves challenged and
transformed by the internet, we can look to online book sharing
communities for lessons in participatory governance, technological
innovation, and economic sustainability.
The primary aims of this paper are ethnographic and descriptive: to
study and to learn from a library that constitutes one of the world's
largest digital archives, rivaling *Google Books*, *Hathi Trust*, and
*Europeana*. In approaching a "thick description" of this archive we
begin to broach questions of scope and impact. We would like to ask:
Who? Where? and Why? What kind of people distribute books online? What
motivates their activity? What technologies enable the sharing of print
media? And what lessons can we draw from them? Our secondary aim is to
continue the work of exploring the phenomenon of book sharing more
widely, placing it in the context of other commons-based peer production
communities like Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia. The archetypal model
of peer production is one motivated by altruistic participation. But the
very history of public libraries is one that combines the impulse to
share and to protect. To paraphrase Jacques Derrida
^[4](#fn-2025-4){#fnref-2025-4}^ writing in "Archive Fever," the archive
shelters memory just as it shelters itself from memory. We encompass
this dual dynamic under the term "peer preservation," where the
logistics of "peers" and of "preservation" can sometimes work at odds to
one another.
Academic literature tends to view piracy on the continuum between free
culture and intellectual property rights. On the one side, an argument
is made for unrestricted access to information as a prerequisite to
properly deliberative democracy.^[5](#fn-2025-5){#fnref-2025-5}^ On this
view, access to knowledge is a form of political power, which must be
equitably distributed, redressing regional and social imbalances of
access.^[6](#fn-2025-6){#fnref-2025-6}^ The other side offers pragmatic
reasoning related to the long-term sustainability of the cultural
sphere, which, in order to prosper, must provide proper economic
incentives to content creators.^[7](#fn-2025-7){#fnref-2025-7}^
It is our contention that grassroots file sharing practices cannot be
understood solely in terms of access or intellectual property. Our field
work shows that while some members of the book sharing community
participate for activist or ideological reasons, others do so as
collectors, preservationists, curators, or simply readers. Despite
romantic notions to the contrary, reading is a social and mediated
activity. The reader encounters texts in conversation, through a variety
of physical interfaces and within an ecosystem of overlapping
communities, each projecting their own material contexts, social norms,
and ideologies. A technician who works in a biology laboratory, for
example, might publish closed-access peer-review articles by day, as
part of his work collective, and release terabytes of published material
by night, in the role of a moderator for an online digital library. Our
approach then, is to capture some of the complexity of such an
ecosystem, particularly in the liminal areas where people, texts, and
technology converge.
**Ethics disclaimer**
Research for this paper was conducted under the aegis of piracyLab, an
academic collective exploring the impact of technology on the spread of
knowledge globally.^[8](#fn-2025-8){#fnref-2025-8}^ One of the lab's
first tasks was to discuss the ethical challenges of collaborative
research in this space. The conversation involved students, faculty,
librarians, and informal legal council. Neutrality, to the extent that
it is possible, emerged as one of our foundational principles. To keep
all channels of communication open, we wanted to avoid bias and to give
voice to a diversity of stakeholders: from authors, to publishers, to
distributors, whether sanctioned or not. Following a frank discussion
and after several iterations, we drafted an ethics charter that
continues to inform our work today. The charter contains the following
provisions:
-- We neither condone nor condemn any forms of information exchange.\
-- We strive to protect our sources and do not retain any identifying
personal information.\
-- We seek transparency in sharing our methods, data, and findings with
the widest possible audience.\
-- Credit where credit is due. We believe in documenting attribution
thoroughly.\
-- We limit our usage of licensed material to the analysis of metadata,
with results used for non-commercial, nonprofit, educational purposes.\
-- Lab participants commit to abiding by these principles as long as
they remain active members of the research group.
In accordance with these principles and following the practice of
scholars like Balazs Bodo ^[9](#fn-2025-9){#fnref-2025-9}^, Eric Priest
^[10](#fn-2025-10){#fnref-2025-10}^, and Ramon Lobato and Leah Tang
^[11](#fn-2025-11){#fnref-2025-11}^, we redact the names of file sharing
services and user names, where such names are not made explicitly public
elsewhere.
**Centralization**
We begin with the intuition that all infrastructure is social to an
extent. Even private library collections cannot be said to reflect the
work of a single individual. Collective forces shape furniture, books,
and the very cognitive scaffolding that enables reading and
interpretation. Yet, there are significant qualitative differences in
the systems underpinning private collections, public libraries, and
unsanctioned peer-to-peer information exchanges like *The Pirate Bay*,
for example. Given these differences, the recent history of online book
sharing can be divided roughly into two periods. The first is
characterized by local, ad-hoc peer-to-peer document exchanges and the
subsequent growth of centralized content aggregators. Following trends
in the development of the web as a whole, shadow libraries of the second
period are characterized by communal governance and distributed
infrastructure.
Shadow libraries of the first period resemble a private library in that
they often emanate from a single authoritative source--a site of
collection and distribution associated with an individual collector,
sometimes explicitly. The library of Maxim Moshkov, for example,
established in 1994 and still thriving at *lib.ru*, is one of the most
visible collections of this kind. Despite their success, such libraries
are limited in scale by the means and efforts of a few individuals. Due
to their centralized architecture they are also susceptible to legal
challenges from copyright owners and to state intervention.
Shadow libraries responded to these problems by distributing labor,
responsibility, and infrastructure, resulting in a system that is more
robust, more redundant, and more resistant to any single point of
failure or control.
The case of *Gigapedia* (later *library.nu*) and its related file
hosting service *ifile.it* demonstrates the successes and the
deficiencies of the centralized digital library model. Arguably among
the largest and most popular virtual libraries online in the period of
2009-2011, the sites were operated by Irish
nationals^[12](#fn-2025-12){#fnref-2025-12}^ on domains registered in
Italy and on the island state of Niue, with servers on the territory of
Germany and Ukraine. At its peak, *library.nu* (LNU) hosted more than
400,000 books and was purported to make an "estimated turnover of EUR 8
million (USD 10,602,400) from advertising revenues, donations and sales
of premium-level accounts," at least according to a press release made
by the International Publishers Association
(IPA).^[13](#fn-2025-13){#fnref-2025-13}^\
*Archived version of library.nu, circa 12/10/2010*
Its apparent popularity notwithstanding, *LNU/Gigapedia* was supported
by relatively simple architecture, likely maintained by a lone
developer-administrator. The site itself consisted of a catalog of
digital books and related metadata, including title, author, year of
publication, number of pages, description, category classification, and
a number of boolean parameters (whether the file is bookmarked,
paginated, vectorized, is searchable, and has a cover). Although the
books could be hosted anywhere, many in the catalog resided on the
servers of a "cyberlocker" service *ifile.it*, affiliated with the main
site. Not strictly a single-source archive, *LNU/Gigapedia* was
nevertheless a federated entity, tied to a single site and to a single
individual. On February 15, 2012, in a Munich court, the IPA, in
conjunction with a consortium of international publishing houses and the
help of the German law firm Lausen
Rechtsanwalte,^[14](#fn-2025-14){#fnref-2025-14}^ served judicial
cease-and-desist orders naming both sites (*Gigapedia* and *ifile.it*).
Seventeen injunctions were sought in Ireland, with the consequent
voluntary shut-down of both domains, which for a brief time redirected
visitors first to *Google Books* and then to *Blue Latitudes*, a *New
York Times* bestseller about pirates, for sale on *Amazon*.
Figure 1: Archived version of library.nu, circa 12/10/2010
:::
The relatively brief, by library standards, existence of *LNU/Gigapedia*
underscores a weakness in the federated library model. The site
flourished as long as it did not attract the ire of the publishing
industry. A lack of redundancy in the site's administrative structure
paralleled its lack on the server level. Once the authorities were able
to establish the identity of the site's operators (via *Paypal*
receipts, according to a partner at Lausen Rechtsanwalte), the project
was forced to shut down irrevocably.^[15](#fn-2025-15){#fnref-2025-15}^
The system's single point of origin proved also to be its single point
of failure.
Jens Bammel, Secretary General of the IPA, called the action "an
important step towards a more transparent, honest and fair trade of
digital content on the Internet."^[16](#fn-2025-16){#fnref-2025-16}^ The
rest of the internet mourned the passage of "the greatest, largest and
the best website for downloading
eBooks,"^[17](#fn-2025-17){#fnref-2025-17}^ comparing the demise of
*LNU/Gigapedia* to the burning of the ancient Library of
Alexandria.^[18](#fn-2025-18){#fnref-2025-18}^ Readers from around the
world flocked to sites like *Reddit* and *TorrentFreak* to express their
support and anger. For example, one reader wrote on *TorrentFreak*:
> I live in Macedonia (the Balkans), a country where the average salary
> is somewhere around 200eu, and I'm a student, attending a MA degree in
> communication sci. \[...\] where I come from the public library is not
> an option. \[...\] Our libraries are so poor, mostly containing 30year
> or older editions of books that almost never refer to the field of
> communication or any other contemporary science. My professors never
> hide that they use sites like library.nu \[...\] Original textbooks
> \[...\] are copy-printed handouts of some god knows how obtained
> original \[...\] For a country like Macedonia and the Balkans region
> generally THIS IS A APOCALYPTIC SCALE DISASTER! I really feel like the
> dark age is just around the corner these
> days.^[19](#fn-2025-19){#fnref-2025-19}^
A similar comment on *Reddit* reads:
> This is the saddest news of the year...heart-breaking...shocking...I
> was so attached to this site...I am from a third world country where
> buying original books is way too expensive if we see currency exchange
> rates...library.nu was a sea of knowledge for me and I learnt a lot
> from it \[...\] RIP library.nu...you have ignited several minds with
> free knowledge.^[20](#fn-2025-20){#fnref-2025-20}^
Another redditor wrote:
> This was an invaluable resource for international academics. The
> catalog of libraries overseas often cannot meet the needs of
> researchers in fields not specific to the country in which they are
> located. My doctoral research has taken a significant blow due to this
> recent shutdown \[...\] Please publishers, if you take away such a
> valuable resource, realize that you have created a gap that will be
> filled. This gap can either be filled by you or by
> us.^[21](#fn-2025-21){#fnref-2025-21}^
Another concludes:
> This just makes me want to start archiving everything I can get my
> hands on.^[22](#fn-2025-22){#fnref-2025-22}^
These anecdotal reports confirm our own experiences of studying and
teaching at universities with a diverse audience of international
students, who often recount a similar personal narrative. *Gigapedia*
and analogous sites fulfilled an unmet need in the international market,
redressing global inequities of access to
information.^[23](#fn-2025-23){#fnref-2025-23}^
But, being a cyberlocker-based service, *Gigapedia* did not succeed in
cultivating a meaningful sense of a community (even though it supported
a forum for brief periods of its existence). As Lobato and Tang
^[24](#fn-2025-24){#fnref-2025-24}^ write in their paper on
cyberlocker-based media distribution systems, cyberlockers in general
"do not foster collaboration and co-creation," taking an "instrumental
view of content hosted on their
sites."^[25](#fn-2025-25){#fnref-2025-25}^ Although not strictly a
cyberlocker, *LNU/Gigapedia* fit the profile of a passive,
non-transformative site by these criteria. For Lobato and Tang, the
rapid disappearance of many prominent cyberlocker sites underscores the
"structural instability" of "fragile file-hosting
ecology."^[26](#fn-2025-26){#fnref-2025-26}^ In our case, it would be
more precise to say that cyberlocker architecture highlights rather the
structural instability of centralized media archives, and not of file
sharing communities in general. Although bereaved readers were concerned
about the irrevocable loss of a valuable resource, digital libraries
that followed built a model of file sharing that is more resilient, more
transparent, and more participatory than their *LNU/Gigapedia*
predecessors.
**Distribution**
In parallel with the development of *LNU/Gigapedia*, a group of Russian
enthusiasts were working on a meta-library of sorts, under the name of
*Aleph*. Records of *Aleph's* activity go back at least as far as 2009.
Colloquially known as "prospectors," the volunteer members of *Aleph*
compiled library collections widely available on the gray market, with
an emphasis on academic and technical literature in Russian and
English.\
*DVD case cover of "Traum's library" advertising "more than 167,000
books" in fb2 format. Similar DVDs sell for around 1,000 RUB (\$25-30
US) on the streets of Moscow.*
At its inception, *Aleph* aggregated several "home-grown" archives,
already in wide circulation in universities and on the gray market.
These included:
-- *KoLXo3*, a collection of scientific texts that was at one time
distributed on 20 DVDs, overlapping with early Gigapedia efforts;\
-- *mexmat*, a library collected by the members of Moscow State
University's Department of Mechanics and Mathematics for internal use,
originally distributed through private FTP servers;\
-- *Homelab*, *Ihtik*, and *Ingsat* libraries;\
-- the Foreign Fiction archive collected from IRC \#\*\*\*
2003.09-2011.07.09 and the Internet Library;\
-- the *Great Science Textbooks* collection and, later, over 20 smaller
miscellaneous archives.^[27](#fn-2025-27){#fnref-2025-27}^
In retrospect, we can categorize the founding efforts along three
parallel tracks: 1) as the development of "front-end" server software
for searching and downloading books, 2) as the organization of an online
forum for enthusiasts willing to contribute to the project, and 3) the
collection effort required to expand and maintain the "back-end" archive
of documents, primarily in .pdf and .djvu
formats.^[28](#fn-2025-28){#fnref-2025-28}^ "What do we do?" writes one
of the early volunteers (in 2009) on the topic of "Outcomes, Goals, and
Scope of the Project." He answers: "we loot sites with ready-made
collections," "sort the indices in arbitrary normalized formats," "for
uncatalogued books we build a 'technical index': name of file, size,
hashcode," "write scripts for database sorting after the initial catalog
process," "search the database," "use the database for the construction
of an accessible catalog," "build torrents for the distribution of files
in the collection."^[29](#fn-2025-29){#fnref-2025-29}^ But, "everything
begins with the forum," in the words of another founding
member.^[30](#fn-2025-30){#fnref-2025-30}^ *Aleph*, the very name of the
group, reflects the aspiration to develop a "platform for the inception
of subsequent and more user-friendly" libraries--a platform "useful for
the developer, the reader, and the
librarian."^[31](#fn-2025-31){#fnref-2025-31}^\
Aleph's *anatomy*
Figure 2: DVD case cover of "Traum's library" advertising "more than
167,000 books
:::
What is *Aleph*? Is it a collection of books? A community? A piece of
software? What makes a library? When attempting to visualize Aleph's
constituents (Figure 3), it seems insufficient to point to books alone,
or to social structure, or to technology in the absence of people and
content. Taking a systems approach to description, we understand a
library to comprise an assemblage of books, people, and infrastructure,
along with their corresponding words and texts, rules and institutions,
and shelves and servers.^[32](#fn-2025-32){#fnref-2025-32}^ In this
light, *Aleph*'s iteration on *LNU/Gigapedia* lies not in technological
advancement alone, but in system architecture, on all levels of
analysis.
Where the latter relied on proprietary server applications, *Aleph*
built software that enabled others to mirror and to serve the site in
its entirety. The server was written by d\* from www.l\*.com (Bet),
utilizing a codebase common to several similar large book-sharing
communities. The initial organizational efforts happened on a sub-forum
of a popular torrent tracker (*RR*). Fifteen founding members reached
early consensus to start hashing document filenames (using the MD5
message-digest algorithm), rather than to store files as is, with their
appropriate .pdf or .mobi extensions.^[33](#fn-2025-33){#fnref-2025-33}^
Bit-wise hashing was likely chosen as a (computationally) cheap way to
de-duplicate documents, since two identical files would hash into an
identical string. Hashing the filenames was hoped to have the
side-effect of discouraging direct (file system-level) browsing of the
archive.^[34](#fn-2025-34){#fnref-2025-34}^ Instead, the books were
meant to be accessed through the front-end "librarian" interface, which
added a layer of meta-data and search tools. In other words, the group
went out of its way to distribute *Aleph* as a library and not merely as
a large aggregation of raw files.
Site volunteers coordinate their efforts asynchronously, by means of a
simple online forum (using *phpBB* software), open to all interested
participants. Important issues related to the governance of the
project--decisions about new hardware upgrades, software design, and
book acquisition--receive public airing. For example, at one point, the
site experienced increased traffic from *Google* searches. Some senior
members welcomed the attention, hoping to attract new volunteers. Others
worried increased visibility would bring unwanted scrutiny. To resolve
the issue, a member suggested delisting the website by altering the
robots.txt configuration file and thereby blocking *Google*
crawlers.^[35](#fn-2025-35){#fnref-2025-35}^ Consequently, the site
would become invisible to *Google*, while remaining freely accessible
via a direct link. Early conversations on *RR*, reflect a consistent
concern about the archive's longevity and its vulnerability to official
sanctions. Rather than following the cyber-locker model of distribution,
the prospectors decided to release canonical versions of the library in
chunks, via *BitTorrent*--a distributed protocol for file sharing.
Another decision was made to "store" the library on open trackers (like
*The Pirate Bay*), rather than tying it to a closed, by-invitation-only
community. Although *LN/Gigapedia* was already decentralized to an
extent, the archeology of the community discussion reveals a multitude
of concious choices that work to further atomize *Aleph* and to
decentralize it along the axes of the collection, governance, and
engineering.
By March of 2009 these efforts resulted in approximately 79k volumes or
around 180gb of data.^[36](#fn-2025-36){#fnref-2025-36}^ By December of
the same year, the moderators began talking about a terabyte, 2tb in
2010, and around 7tb by 2011.^[37](#fn-2025-37){#fnref-2025-37}^ By
2012, the core group of "prospectors" grew to 1,000 registered users.
*Aleph*'s main mirror received over a million page views per month and
about 40,000 unique visits per day.^[38](#fn-2025-38){#fnref-2025-38}^
An online eBook piracy report estimates a combined total of a million
unique visitors per day for *Aleph* and its
mirrors.^[39](#fn-2025-39){#fnref-2025-39}^
As of January 2014, the *Aleph* catalog contains over a million books
(1,021,000) and over 15 million academic articles, "weighing in" at just
under 10tb. Most remarkably, one of the world's largest digital
libraries operates on an annual budget of \$1,900
US.^[40](#fn-2025-40){#fnref-2025-40}^
\#\#\# Vulnerability\
Distributed architecture gives *Aleph* significant advantages over its
federated predecessors. Were *Aleph* servers to go offline the archive
would survive "in the cloud" of the *BitTorrent* network. Should the
forum (*Bet*) close, another online forum could easily take its place.
And were *Aleph* library portal itself go dark, other mirrors would (and
usually do) quickly take its place.
But the decentralized model of content distribution is not without its
challenges. To understand them, we need to review some of the
fundamentals behind the *BitTorrent* protocol. At its bare minimum (as
it was described in the original specification by Bram Cohen) the
protocol involves a "seeder," someone willing to share something it its
entirety; a "leecher," someone downloading shared data; and a torrent
"tracker" that coordinates activity between seeders and
leechers.^[41](#fn-2025-41){#fnref-2025-41}^
Imagine a music album sharing agreement between three friends, where,
initially, only one holds a copy of some album: for example, Nirvana's
*Nevermind*. Under the centralized model of file sharing, the friend
holding the album would transmit two copies, one to each friend. The
power of *BitTorrent* comes from shifting the burden of sharing from a
single seeder (friend one) to a "swarm" of leechers (friends two and
three). On this model, the first leecher joining the network (friend
two, in our case) would begin to get his data from the seeder directly,
as before. But the second leecher would receive some bits from the
seeder and some from the first leecher, in a non-linear, asynchronous
fashion. In our example, we can imagine the remaining friend getting
some songs from the first friend and some from the second. The friend
who held the album originally now transmitted something less than two
full copies of the album, since the other two friends exchanged some
bits of information between themselves, lessening the load on the
original album holder.
When downloading from the *BitTorrent* network, a peer may receive some
bits from the beginning of the document, some from the middle, and some
from the end, in parts distributed among the members of the swarm. A
local application called the "client" is responsible for checking the
integrity of the pieces and for reassembling the them into a coherent
whole. A torrent "tracker" coordinates the activity between peers,
keeping track of who has what where. Having received the whole document,
a leecher can, in turn, become a seeder by sharing all of his downloaded
bits with the remaining swarm (who only have partial copies). The
leecher can also take the file offline, choosing not to share at
all.^[42](#fn-2025-42){#fnref-2025-42}^
The original protocol left torrent trackers vulnerable to charges of
aiding and abetting copyright
infringement.^[43](#fn-2025-43){#fnref-2025-43}^ Early in 2008, Cohen
extended *BitTorrent* to make use of "distributed sloppy hash tables"
(DHT) for storing peer locations without resorting to a central tracker.
Under these new guidelines, each peer would maintain a small routing
table pointing to a handful of nearby peer locations. In effect, DHT
placed additional responsibility on the swarm to become a tracker of
sorts, however "sloppy" and imperfect. By November of of 2009, *Pirate
Bay* announced its transition away from tracking entirely, in favor of
DHT and the related PEX and Magnetic Links protocols. At the time they
called it, "world's most resilient
tracking."^[44](#fn-2025-44){#fnref-2025-44}^
Despite these advancements, the decentralized model of file sharing
remains susceptible to several chronic ailments. The first follows from
the fact that ad-hoc distribution networks privilege popular material. A
file needs to be actively traded to ensure its availability. If nobody
is actively sharing and downloading Nirvana's *Nevermind*, the album is
in danger of fading out of the cloud. As one member wrote succinctly on
*Gimel* forums, "unpopular files are in danger of become
inaccessible."^[45](#fn-2025-45){#fnref-2025-45}^ This dynamic is less
of a concern for Hollywood blockbusters, but more so for "long tail"
specialized materials of the sort found in *Aleph*, and indeed, for
*Aleph* itself as a piece of software distributed through the network.
*Aleph* combats the problem of fading torrents by renting
"seedboxes"--servers dedicated to keeping the *Aleph* seeds containing
the archive alive, preserving the availability of the collection. The
server in production as of 2014 can serve up to 12tb of data speeds of
100-800 megabits per second. Other file sharing communities address the
issue by enforcing a certain download to upload ratio on members of
their network.
The lack of true anonymity is the second problem intrinsic to the
*BitTorrent* protocol. Peers sharing bits directly cannot but avoid
exposing their IP address (unless these are masked behind virtual
private networks or TOR relays). A "Sybil" attack becomes possible when
a malicious peer shares bits in bad faith, with the intent to log IP
addresses.^[46](#fn-2025-46){#fnref-2025-46}^ Researchers exploring this
vector of attack were able to harvest more than 91,000 IP addresses in
less than 24 hours of sharing a popular television
show.^[47](#fn-2025-47){#fnref-2025-47}^ They report that more than 9%
of requests made to their servers indicated "modified clients", which
are likely also to be running experiments in the DHT. Legitimate
copyright holders and copyright "trolls" alike have used this
vulnerability to bring lawsuits against individual sharers in
court.^[48](#fn-2025-48){#fnref-2025-48}^
These two challenges are further exacerbated in the case of *Aleph*,
which uses *BitTorrent* to distribute large parts of its own
architecture. These parts are relatively large--around 40-50GB each.
Long-term sustainability of *Aleph* as a distributed system therefore
requires a rare participant: one interested in downloading the archive
as a whole (as opposed to downloading individual books), one who owns
the hardware to store and transmit terabytes of data, and one possessing
the technical expertise to do so safely.
**Peer preservation**
In light of the challenges and the effort involved in maintaining the
archive, one would be remiss to describe *Aleph* merely in terms of book
piracy, understood in conventional terms of financial gain, theft, or
profiteering. Day-to-day labor of the core group is much more
comprehensible as a mode of commons-based peer production, which is, in
the canonical definition, work made possible by a "networked
environment," "radically decentralized, collaborative, and
non-proprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely
distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other
without relying on either market signals or managerial
commands."^[49](#fn-2025-49){#fnref-2025-49}^ *Aleph* answers the
definition of peer production, resembling in many respects projects like
*Linux*, *Wikipedia*, and *Project Gutenberg*.
Yet, *Aleph* is also patently a library. Its work can and should be
viewed in the broader context of Enlightenment ideals: access to
literacy, universal education, and the democratization of knowledge. The
very same ideals gave birth to the public library movement as a whole at
the turn of the 20th century, in the United States, Europe, and
Russia.^[50](#fn-2025-50){#fnref-2025-50}^ Parallels between free
library movements of the early 20th and the early 21st centuries point
to a social dynamic that runs contrary to the populist spirit of
commons-based peer production projects, in a mechanism that we describe
as peer preservation. The idea encompasses conflicting drives both to
share and to hoard information.
The roots of many public libraries lie in extensive private collections.
Bodleian Library at Oxford, for example, traces its origins back to the
collections of Thomas Cobham, Bishop of Worcester, Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester, and to Thomas Bodley, himself an avid book collector.
Similarly, Poland's Zaluski Library, one of Europe's oldest, owes its
existence to the collecting efforts of the Zaluski brothers, both
bishops and bibliophiles.^[51](#fn-2025-51){#fnref-2025-51}^ As we
mentioned earlier, *Aleph* too began its life as an aggregator of
collections, including the personal libraries of Moshkov and Traum. When
books are scarce, private libraries are a sign of material wealth and
prestige. In the digital realm, where the cost of media acquisition is
low, collectors amass social capital. *Aleph* extends its collecting
efforts on *RR*, a much larger, moderated torrent exchange forum and
tracker. *RR* hosts a number of sub-forums dedicated to the exchange of
software, film, music, and books (where members of *Aleph* often make an
appearance). In the exchange economy of symbolic goods, top collectors
are known by their standing in the community, as measured by their
seniority, upload and download ratios, and the number of "releases." A
release is more than just a file: it must not duplicate items in the
archive and follows strict community guidelines related to packaging,
quality, and meta-data accompanying the document. Less experienced
members of the community treat high status numbers with reverence and
respect.
According to a question and answer session with an official *RR*
representative, *RR* is not particularly friendly to new
users.^[52](#fn-2025-52){#fnref-2025-52}^ In fact, high barriers to
entry are exactly what differentiates *RR* from sites like *The Pirate
Bay* and other unmoderated, open trackers. *RR* prides itself on the
"quality of its moderation." Unlike *Pirate Bay*, *RR* sees itself as a
"media library", where content is "organized and properly shelved." To
produce an acceptable book "release" one needs to create a package of
files, including well-formatted meta-data (following strict stylistic
rules) in the header, the name of the book, an image of its cover, the
year of release, author, genre, publisher, format, language, a required
description, and screenshots of a sample page. The files must be named
according to a convention, be "of the same kind" (that is belong to the
same collection), and be of the right size. Home-made scans are
discouraged and governed by a 1,000-words instruction manual. Scanned
books must have clear attribution to the releaser responsible for
scanning and processing.
More than that, guidelines indicate that smaller releases should be
expected to be "absorbed" into larger ones. In this way, a single novel
by Charles Dickens can and will be absorbed into his collected works,
which might further be absorbed into "Novels of 19th Century," and then
into "Foreign Fiction" (as a hypothetical, but realistic example).
According to the rules, the collection doing the absorbing must be "at
least 50% larger than the collection it is absorbing." Releases are
further governed by a subset or rules particular to the forum
subsections (e.g. journals, fiction, documentation, service manuals,
etc.).^[53](#fn-2025-53){#fnref-2025-53}^
All this to say that although barriers to acquisition are low, the
barriers to active participation are high and continually *increase with
time*. The absorption of smaller collections by larger favors the
veterans. Rules and regulations grow in complexity with the maturation
of the community, further widening the rift between senior and junior
peers. We are then witnessing something like the institutionalization of
a professional "librarian" class, whose task it is to protect the
collection from the encroachment of low-quality contributors. Rather
than serving the public, a librarian's primary commitment is to the
preservation of the archive as a whole. Thus what starts as a true peer
production project, may, in the end, grow to erect solid walls to
peering. This dynamic is already embodied in the history of public
libraries, where amateur librarians of the late 19th century eventually
gave way to their modern degree-holding counterparts. The conflicting
logistics of access and preservation may lead digital library
development along a similar path.
The expression of this dual push and pull dynamic in the observed
practices of peer preservation communities conforms to Derrida's insight
into the nature of the archive. Just as the walls of a library serve to
shelter the documents within, they also isolate the collection from the
public at large. Access and preservation, in that sense, subsist at
opposite and sometime mutually exclusive ends of the sharing spectrum.
And it may be that this dynamic is particular to all peer production
communities, like *Wikipedia*, which, according to recent studies, saw a
decline in new contributors due to increasingly strict rule
enforcement.^[54](#fn-2025-54){#fnref-2025-54}^ However, our results are
merely speculative at the moment. The analysis of a large dataset we
have collected as corollary to our field work online may offer further
evidence for these initial intuitions. In the meantime, it is not enough
to conclude that brick-and-mortar libraries should learn from these
emergent, distributed architectures of peer preservation. If the future
of *Aleph* is leading to increased institutionalization, the community
may soon face the fate embodied by its own procedures: the absorption of
smaller, wonderfully messy, ascending collections into larger, more
established, and more rigid social structures.
**Biographies**
Dennis Tenen teaches in the fields of new media and digital humanities
at Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative
Literature. His research often happens at the intersection of people,
texts, and technology. He is currently writing a book on minimal
computing, called *Plain Text*.
Maxwell Foxman is an adjunct professor at Marymount Manhattan College
and a PhD candidate in Communications at Columbia University, where he
studies the use and adoption of digital media into everyday life. He has
written on failed social media and on gamification in electoral
politics, newsrooms, and mobile media.
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1907), 230. [[↩](#fnref-2025-1)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-1}
2. [Lawrence Liang, "Shadow Libraries E-Flux," 2012.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-2)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-2}
3. [McKendrick, Joseph. *Libraries: At the Epicenter of the Digital
Disruption, The Library Resource Guide Benchmark Study on 2013/14
Library Spending Plans* (Unisphere Media, 2013).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-3)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-3}
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(July 1995): 9--63.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-4)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-4}
5. [Yochai Benkler, *The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom* (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 92; Paul DiMaggio et al., "Social Implications of the
Internet," *Annual Review of Sociology* 27 (January 2001): 320; Zizi
Papacharissi "The Virtual Sphere the Internet as a Public Sphere,"
*New Media & Society* 4.1 (2002): 9--27; Craig Calhoun "Information
Technology and the International Public Sphere," in *Shaping the
Network Society: the New Role of Civil Society in Cyberspace*, ed.
Douglas Schuler and Peter Day (MIT Press, 2004), 229--52.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-5)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-5}
6. [Benkler, *The Wealth of Networks*, 442; Manuel Castells,
"Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society,"
*International Journal of Communication* (2007): 251; Lawrence
Lessig *Free Culture:How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to
Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity* (The Penguin Press, 2004);
Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing Without
Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 153.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-6)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-6}
7. [Brian R. Day "In Defense of Copyright: Creativity, Record Labels,
and the Future of Music," *Seton Hall Journal of Sports and
Entertainment Law*, 21.1 (2011); William M. Landes and Richard A.
Posner, *The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law*
(Harvard University Press, 2003). For further discussion see
Steve P. Calandrillo, "Economic Analysis of Property Rights in
Information: Justifications and Problems of Exclusive Rights,
Incentives to Generate Information, and the Alternative of a
Government-Run Reward System" *Fordham Intellectual Property, Media
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and Culture in Copyright Theory," *U.C. Davis Law Review* 40 (2006):
1151; Justin Hughes "Philosophy of Intellectual Property,"
*Georgetown Law Journal* 77 (1988): 303.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-7)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-7}
8. [[piracylab.org](“http://piracylab.org”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-8)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-8}
9. ["Set the Fox to Watch the Geese: Voluntary IP Regimes in Piratical
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-9)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-9}
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-10)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-10}
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-11)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-11}
12. [The injunctions name I\* and F\* N\* (also known as Smiley).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-12)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-12}
13. ["Publishers Strike Major Blow against Internet Piracy" last
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-13)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-13}
14. [Including the German Publishers and Booksellers Association,
Cambridge University Press, Georg Thieme, Harper Collins, Hogrefe,
Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Cengage Learning, Elsevier, John Wiley &
Sons, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education Ltd., Pearson
Education Inc., Oxford University Press, Springer, Taylor & Francis,
C.H. Beck as well as Walter De Gruyter. The legal proceedings are
also supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the
Dutch Publishers Association (NUV), the Italian Publishers
Association (AIE) and the International Association of Scientific
Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-14)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-14}
15. [Andrew Losowsky, "Book Downloading Site Targeted in Injunctions
Requested by 17 Publishers," *Huffington Post*, accessed on
September 1, 2014,
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-15)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-15}
16. [International Publishers Association.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-16)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-16}
17. [Vik, "Gigapedia: The greatest, largest and the best website for
downloading eBooks," Emotionallyspeaking.com, last edited on August
10, 2009 and archived on July 15, 2012,
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-17)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-17}
18. [Anonymous author, "Library.nu: Modern era's 'Destruction of the
Library of Alexandria,'" *Breaking Culture* (on tublr.com), last
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[[↩](#fnref-2025-18)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-18}
19. [[http://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-shut-down-library-nu-and-ifile-it-120215](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140110050710/http://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-shut-down-library-nu-and-ifile-it-120215”)
archived on January 10, 2014.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-19)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-19}
20. [[http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu\_admin\_the\_website\_is\_shutting\_down\_due](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140110050450/http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu_admin_the_website_is_shutting_down_due”)
archived on January 10, 2014.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-20)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-20}
21. [[http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu\_admin\_the\_website\_is\_shutting\_down\_due](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140110050450/http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu_admin_the_website_is_shutting_down_due”)
orchived on January 10, 2014.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-21)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-21}
22. [[www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu\_admin\_the\_website\_is\_shutting\_down\_due](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140110050450/http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/ppfwc/librarynu_admin_the_website_is_shutting_down_due”)
archived on January 10, 2014.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-22)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-22}
23. [This point is made at length in the report on media piracy in
emerging economies, released by the American Assembly in 2011. See
Joe Karaganis, ed. *Media Piracy in Emerging Economies* (Social
Science Research Network, March 2011),
[http://piracy.americanassembly.org/the-report/](“http://piracy.americanassembly.org/the-report/”), I.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-23)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-23}
24. [Lobato and Tang, "The Cyberlocker Gold Rush."
[[↩](#fnref-2025-24)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-24}
25. [Lobato and Tang, "The Cyberlocker Gold Rush," 9.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-25)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-25}
26. [Lobato and Tang, "The Cyberlocker Gold Rush," 7.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-26)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-26}
27. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=169; GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=299.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-27)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-27}
28. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=299.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-28)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-28}
29. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=169. All quotes translated from Russian
by the authors, unless otherwise noted.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-29)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-29}
30. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6999&p=41911.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-30)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-30}
31. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=757.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-31)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-31}
32. [In this sense, we see our work as complementary to but not
exhausted by infrastructure studies. See Geoffrey C. Bowker and
Susan Leigh Star, *Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its
Consequences* (The MIT Press, 1999); Paul N. Edwards, "Y2K:
Millennial Reflections on Computers as Infrastructure," *History and
Technology* 15.1-2 (1998): 7--29; Paul N. Edwards, "Infrastructure
and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History
of Sociotechnical Systems," in *Modernity and Technology*, 2003,
185--225; Paul N. Edwards et al., "Introduction: an Agenda for
Infrastructure Studies," *Journal of the Association for Information
Systems* 10.5 (2009): 364--74; Brian Larkin "Degraded Images,
Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy,"
*Public Culture* 16.2 (2004): 289--314; Brian Larkin "Pirate
Infrastructures," in *Structures of Participation in Digital
Culture*, ed. Joe Karaganis (New York: SSRC, 2008), 74--87; Susan
Leigh Star and Geoffrey C. Bowker, "How to Infrastructure," in
*Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of
ICTs*, (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2010), 230--46.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-32)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-32}
33. [For information on cryptographic hashing see Praveen Gauravaram and
Lars R. Knudsen, "Cryptographic Hash Functions," in *Handbook of
Information and Communication Security*, ed. Peter Stavroulakis and
Mark Stamp (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010), 59--79.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-33)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-33}
34. [See GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=55kj and
GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18&sid=936.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-34)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-34}
35. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=714.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-35)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-35}
36. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=47.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-36)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-36}
37. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=175&hilit=RR&start=25.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-37)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-37}
38. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=104&start=450.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-38)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-38}
39. [URL redacted; These numbers should be taken as a very rough
estimate because 1) we do not consider Alexa to be a reliable source
for web traffic and 2) some of the other figures cited in the report
are suspicious. For example, *Aleph* has a relatively small archive
of foreign fiction, at odds with the reported figure of 800,000
volumes. [[↩](#fnref-2025-39)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-39}
40. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=7061.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-40)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-40}
41. ["The BitTorrent Protocol Specification," last modified October 20,
2012 and archived on June 13, 2014,
[http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep\_0003.html](“http://web.archive.org/web/20140613190300/http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-41)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-41}
42. [For more information on BitTorrent, see Bram Cohen, *Incentives
Build Robustness in BitTorrent*, last modified on May 22, 2003,
[http://www.bittorrent.org/bittorrentecon.pdf](“http://www.bittorrent.org/bittorrentecon.pdf”);
Ricardo Salmon, Jimmy Tran, and Abdolreza Abhari, "Simulating a File
Sharing System Based on BitTorrent," in *Proceedings of the 2008
Spring Simulation Multiconference*, SpringSim '08 (San Diego, CA,
USA: Society for Computer Simulation International, 2008), 21:1--5.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-42)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-42}
43. [In 2008 *The Pirate Bay* co-founders Peter Sunde, Gottfrid
Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundstromwere were charged
with "conspiracy to break copyright related offenses" in Sweden. See
Simon Johnson for Reuters.com, "Pirate Bay Copyright Test Case
Begins in Sweden," last edited on February 16, 2009 and archived on
August 4, 2014,
[http://uk.reuters.com/article/2009/02/16/tech-us-sweden-piratebay-idUKTRE51F3K120090216](http://web.archive.org/web/20140804000829/http://uk.reuters.com/article/2009/02/16/tech-us-sweden-piratebay-idUKTRE51F3K120090216”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-43)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-43}
44. [TPB, "Worlds most resiliant tracking," last edited November 17,
2009 and archived on August 4, 2014,
[thepiratebay.se/blog/175](“http://web.archive.org/web/20140804015645/http://thepiratebay.se/blog/175”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-44)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-44}
45. [GIMEL/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6999.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-45)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-45}
46. [Thibault Cholez, Isabelle Chrisment, and Olivier Festor "Evaluation
of Sybil Attacks Protection Schemes in KAD," in *Scalability of
Networks and Services*, ed. Ramin Sadre and Aiko Pras, Lecture Notes
in Computer Science 5637 (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009), 70--82.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-46)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-46}
47. [J.P. Timpanaro et al., "BitTorrent's Mainline DHT Security
Assessment," in *2011 4th IFIP International Conference on New
Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS)*, 2011, 1--5.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-47)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-47}
48. [Ernesto, "US P2P Lawsuit Shows Signs of a 'Pirate Honeypot',"
Technology, *TorrentFreak*, last edited in June 2011 and archived on
January 14, 2014,
[http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pirate-honeypot-110601/](“https://web.archive.org/web/20140114200326/http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p2p-lawsuit-shows-signs-of-a-pirate-honeypot-110601/”).
[[↩](#fnref-2025-48)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-48}
49. [Benkler *The Wealth of Networks*, 60.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-49)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-49}
50. [On the free and public library movement in England and the United
States see Thomas Greenwood, *Public Libraries: a History of the
Movement and a Manual for the Organization and Management of Rate
Supported Libraries* (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1890);
Elizabeth Akers Allen and James Phinney Baxter, *Dedicatory
Exercises of the Baxter Building* (Auburn, Me: Lakeside Press,
1889). To read more about the history of free and public library
movements in Russia see Mary Stuart, "The Evolution of Librarianship
in Russia: the Librarians of the Imperial Public Library,
1808-1868," *The Library Quarterly* 64.1 (January 1994): 1--29; Mary
Stuart, "Creating a National Library for the Workers' State: the
Public Library in Petrograd and the Rumiantsev Library Under
Bolshevik Rule," *The Slavonic and East European Review* 72.2 (April
1994): 233--58; Mary Stuart "The Ennobling Illusion: the Public
Library Movement in Late Imperial Russia," *The Slavonic and East
European Review* 76.3 (July 1998): 401--40.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-50)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-50}
51. [Michael H. Harris, *History of Libraries of the Western World*,
(London: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 136.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-51)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-51}
52. [http://s\*.d\*.ru/comments/508985/.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-52)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-52}
53. [RR/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1590026.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-53)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-53}
54. [Aaron Halfaker et al."The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration
System: How Wikipedia's Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its
Decline," *American Behavioral Scientist*, December 2012.
[[↩](#fnref-2025-54)]{.footnotereverse}]{#fn-2025-54}
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Article printed from Computational Culture:
**http://computationalculture.net**
URL to article:
**http://computationalculture.net/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation/**
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I want to begin this talk at the end -- by which I mean the end of property - at least according to
the cyber-utopian account of things, where digital file sharing and online communication liberate
culture from corporations and their drive for profit. This is just one of the promised forms of
emancipation -- property, in a sense, was undone. People, on a massive scale, used their
computers and their internet connections to share digitized versions of their objects with each
other, quickly producing a different, common form of ownership. The crisis that this provoked is
well-known -- it could be described in one word: Napster. What is less recognized - because it is
still very much in process - is the subsequent undoing of property, of both the private and common
kind. What follows is one story of "the cloud" -- the post-dot-com bubble techno-super-entity -which sucks up property, labor, and free time.
Object, Interface
It's debated whether the growing automation of production leads to global structural
unemployment or not -- Karl Marx wrote that "the self-expansion of capital by means of machinery
is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of
livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery" - but the promise is, of course, that when
robots do the work, we humans are free to be creative. Karl Kautsky predicted that increasing
automation would actually lead, not to a mass surplus population or widespread creativity, but
something much more mundane: the growth of clerks and bookkeepers, and the expansion of
unproductive sectors like "the banking system, the credit system, insurance empires and
advertising."
Marx was analyzing the number of people employed by some of the new industries in the middle
of the 19th century: "gas-works, telegraphy, photography, steam navigation, and railways." The
facts were that these industries were incredibly important, expansive and growing, highly
mechanized.. and employed a very small number of people. It is difficult not to read his study of
these technologies of connection and communication - against the background of our present
moment, in which the rise of the Internet has been accompanied by the deindustrialization of
cities, increased migrant and mobile labor, and jobs made obsolete by computation.
There are obvious examples of the impact of computation on the workplace: at factories and
distribution centers, robots engineered with computer-vision can replace a handful of workers,
with a savings of millions of dollars per robot over the life of the system. And there are less
apparent examples as well, like algorithms determining when and where to hire people and for
how long, according to fluctuating conditions.
Both examples have parallels within computer programming, namely reuse and garbage
collection. Code reuse refers to the practice of writing software in such a way that the code can be
used again later, in another program, to perform the same task. It is considered wasteful to give the
same time, attention, and energy to a function, because the development environment is not an
assembly line - a programmer shouldn't repeat. Such repetition then gives way to copy-andpasting (or merely calling). The analogy here is to the robot, to the replacement of human labor
with technology.
Now, when a program is in the midst of being executed, the computer's memory fills with data -but some of that is obsolete, no longer necessary for that program to run. If left alone, the memory
would become clogged, the program would crash, the computer might crash. It is the role of the
garbage collector to free up memory, deleting what is no longer in use. And here, I'm making the
analogy with flexible labor, workers being made redundant, and so on.
In Object-Oriented Programming, a programmer designs the software that she is writing around
“objects,” where each object is conceptually divided into “public” and “private” parts. The public
parts are accessible to other objects, but the private ones are hidden to the world outside the
boundaries of that object. It's a “black box” - a thing that can be known through its inputs and
outputs - even in total ignorance of its internal mechanisms. What difference does it make if the
code is written in one way versus an other .. if it behaves the same? As William James wrote, “If no
practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing,
and all dispute is idle.”
By merely having a public interface, an object is already a social entity. It makes no sense to even
provide access to the outside if there are no potential objects with which to interact! So to
understand the object-oriented program, we must scale up - not by increasing the size or
complexity of the object, but instead by increasing the number and types of objects such that their
relations become more dense. The result is an intricate machine with an on and an off state, rather
than a beginning and an end. Its parts are interchangeable -- provided that they reliably produce
the same behavior, the same inputs and outputs. Furthermore, this machine can be modified:
objects can be added and removed, changing but not destroying the machine; and it might be,
using Gerald Raunig’s appropriate term, “concatenated” with other machines.
Inevitably, this paradigm for describing the relationship between software objects spread outwards,
subsuming more of the universe outside of the immediate code. External programs, powerful
computers, banking institutions, people, and satellites have all been “encapsulated” and
“abstracted” into objects with inputs and outputs. Is this a conceptual reduction of the richness
and complexity of reality? Yes, but only partially. It is also a real description of how people,
institutions, software, and things are being brought into relationship with one another according to
the demands of networked computation.. and the expanding field of objects are exactly those
entities integrated into such a network.
Consider a simple example of decentralized file-sharing: its diagram might represent an objectoriented piece of software, but here each object is a person-computer, shown in potential relation
to every other person-computer. Files might be sent or received at any point in this machine,
which seems particularly oriented towards circulation and movement. Much remains private, but a
collection of files from every person is made public and opened up to the network. Taken as a
whole, the entire collection of all files - which on the one hand exceeds the storage capacity of
any one person’s technical hardware, is on the other hand entirely available to every personcomputer. If the files were books.. then this collective collection would be a public library.
In order for a system like this to work, for the inputs and the outputs to actually engage with one
another to produce action or transmit data, there needs to be something in place already to enable
meaningful couplings. Before there is any interaction or any relationship, there must be some
common ground in place that allows heterogenous objects to ‘talk to each other’ (to use a phrase
from the business casual language of the Californian Ideology). The term used for such a common
ground - especially on the Internet - is platform, a word for that which enables and anticipates
future action without directly producing it. A platform provides tools and resources to the objects
that run “on top” of the platform so that those objects don't need to have their own tools and
resources. In this sense, the platform offers itself as a way for objects to externalize (and reuse)
labor. Communication between objects is one of the most significant actions that a platform can
provide, but it requires that the objects conform some amount of their inputs and outputs to the
specifications dictated by the platform.
But haven’t I only introduced another coupling, instead of between two objects, this time between
the object and the platform? What I'm talking about with "couplings" is the meeting point between
things - in other words, an “interface.” In the terms of OOP, the interface is an abstraction that
defines what kinds of interaction are possible with an object. It maps out the public face of the
object in a way that is legible and accessible to other objects. Similarly, computer interfaces like
screens and keyboards are designed to meet with human interfaces like fingers and eyes, allowing
for a specific form of interaction between person and machine. Any coupling between objects
passes through some interface and every interface obscures as much as it reveals - it establishes
the boundary between what is public and what is private, what is visible and what is not. The
dominant aesthetic values of user interface design actually privilege such concealment as “good
design,” appealing to principles of simplicity, cleanliness, and clarity.
Cloud, Access
One practical outcome of this has been that there can be tectonic shifts behind the interface where entire systems are restructured or revolutionized - without any interruption, as long as the
interface itself remains essentially unchanged. In Pragmatism’s terms, a successful interface keeps
any difference (in back) from making a difference (in front). Using books again as an example: for
consumers to become accustomed to the initial discomfort of purchasing a product online instead
of from a shop, the interface needs to make it so that “buying a book” is something that could be
interchangeably accomplished either by a traditional bookstore or the online "marketplace"
equivalent. But behind the interface is Amazon, which through low prices and wide selection is
the most visible platform for buying books and uses that position to push retailers and publishers
both to, at best, the bare minimum of profitability.
In addition to selling things to people and collecting data about its users (what they look at and
what they buy) to personalize product recommendations, Amazon has also made an effort to be a
platform for the technical and logistical parts of other retailers. Ultimately collecting data from
them as well, Amazon realizes a competitive advantage from having a comprehensive, up-to-theminute perspective on market trends and inventories. This volume of data is so vast and valuable
that warehouses packed with computers are constructed to store it, protect it, and make it readily
available to algorithms. Data centers, such as these, organize how commodities circulate (they run
business applications, store data about retail, manage fulfillment) but also - increasingly - they
hold the commodity itself - for example, the book. Digital book sales started the millennium very
slowly but by 2010 had overtaken hardcover sales.
Amazon’s store of digital books (or Apple’s or Google’s, for that matter) is a distorted reflection of
the collection circulating within the file-sharing network, displaced from personal computers to
corporate data centers. Here are two regimes of digital property: the swarm and the cloud. For
swarms (a reference to swarm downloading where a single file can be downloaded in parallel
from multiple sources) property is held in common between peers -- however, property is
positioned out of reach, on the cloud, accessible only through an interface that has absorbed legal
and business requirements.
It's just half of the story, however, to associate the cloud with mammoth data centers; the other
half is to be found in our hands and laps. Thin computing, including tablets and e-readers, iPads
and Kindles, and mobile phones have co-evolved with data centers, offering powerful, lightweight
computing precisely because so much processing and storage has been externalized.
In this technical configuration of the cloud, the thin computer and the fat data center meet through
an interface, inevitably clean and simple, that manages access to the remote resources. Typically,
a person needs to agree to certain “terms of service,” have a unique, measurable account, and
provide payment information; in return, access is granted. This access is not ownership in the
conventional sense of a book, or even the digital sense of a file, but rather a license that gives the
person a “non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy… solely for your personal and noncommercial use,” contradicting the First Sale Doctrine, which gives the “owner” the right to sell,
lease, or rent their copy to anyone they choose at any price they choose. The doctrine,
established within America's legal system in 1908, separated the rights of reproduction, from
distribution, as a way to "exhaust" the copyright holder's control over the commodities that people
purchased.. legitimizing institutions like used book stores and public libraries. Computer software
famously attempted to bypass the First Sale Doctrine with its "shrink wrap" licenses that restricted
the rights of the buyer once she broke through the plastic packaging to open the product. This
practice has only evolved and become ubiquitous over the last three decades as software began
being distributed digitally through networks rather than as physical objects in stores. Such
contradictions are symptoms of the shift in property regimes, or what Jeremy Rifkin called “the age
of access.” He writes that “property continues to exist but is far less likely to be exchanged in
markets. Instead, suppliers hold on to property in the new economy and lease, rent, or charge an
admission fee, subscription, or membership dues for its short-term use.”
Thinking again of books, Rifkin’s description gives the image of a paid library emerging as the
synthesis of the public library and the marketplace for commodity exchange. Considering how, on
the one side, traditional public libraries are having their collections deaccessioned, hours of
operation cut, and are in some cases being closed down entirely, and on the other side, the
traditional publishing industry finds its stores, books, and profits dematerialized, the image is
perhaps appropriate. Server racks, in photographs inside data centers, strike an eerie resemblance
to library stacks - - while e-readers are consciously designed to look and feel something like a
book. Yet, when one peers down into the screen of the device, one sees both the book - and the
library.
Like a Facebook account, which must uniquely correspond to a real person, the e-reader is an
individualizing device. It is the object that establishes trusted access with books stored in the cloud
and ensures that each and every person purchases their own rights to read each book. The only
transfer that is allowed is of the device itself, which is the thing that a person actually does own.
But even then, such an act must be reported back to the cloud: the hardware needs to be deregistered and then re-registered with credit card and authentication details about the new owner.
This is no library - or it's only a library in the most impoverished sense of the word. It is a new
enclosure, and it is a familiar story: things in the world (from letters, to photographs, to albums, to
books) are digitized (as emails, JPEGs, MP3s, and PDFs) and subsequently migrate to a remote
location or service (Gmail, Facebook, iTunes, Kindle Store). The middle phase is the biggest
disruption, when the interface does the poorest job concealing the material transformations taking
place, when the work involved in creating those transformations is most apparent, often because
the person themselves is deeply involved in the process (of ripping vinyl, for instance). In the third
phase, the user interface becomes easier, more “frictionless,” and what appears to be just another
application or folder on one’s computer is an engorged, property-and-energy-hungry warehouse a
thousand miles away.
Capture, Loss
Intellectual property's enclosure is easy enough to imagine in warehouses of remote, secure hard
drives. But the cloud internalizes processing as well as storage, capturing the new forms of cooperation and collaboration characterizing the new economy and its immaterial labor. Social
relations are transmuted into database relations on the "social web," which absorbs selforganization as well. Because of this, the cloud impacts as strongly on the production of
publications, as on their consumption, in the tradition sense.
Storage, applications, and services offered in the cloud are marketed for consumption by authors
and publishers alike. Document editing, project management, and accounting are peeled slowly
away from the office staff and personal computers into the data centers; interfaces are established
into various publication channels from print on demand to digital book platforms. In the fully
realized vision of cloud publishing, the entire technical and logistical apparatus is externalized,
leaving only the human labor.. and their thin devices remaining. Little distinguishes the authorobject from the editor-object from the reader-object. All of them.. maintain their position in the
network by paying for lightweight computers and their updates, cloud services, and broadband
internet connections.
On the production side of the book, the promise of the cloud is a recovery of the profits “lost” to
file-sharing, as all that exchange is disciplined, standardized and measured. Consumers are finally
promised the access to the history of human knowledge that they had already improvised by
themselves, but now without the omnipresent threat of legal prosecution. One has the sneaking
suspicion though.. that such a compromise is as hollow.. as the promises to a desperate city of the
jobs that will be created in a new constructed data center - - and that pitting “food on the table”
against “access to knowledge” is both a distraction from and a legitimation of the forms of power
emerging in the cloud. It's a distraction because it's by policing access to knowledge that the
middle-man platform can extract value from publication, both on the writing and reading sides of
the book; and it's a legitimation because the platform poses itself as the only entity that can resolve
the contradiction between the two sides.
When the platform recedes behind the interface, these two sides are the the most visible
antagonism - in a tug-of-war with each other - - yet neither the “producers” nor the “consumers” of
publications are becoming more wealthy, or working less to survive. If we turn the picture
sideways, however, a new contradiction emerges, between the indebted, living labor - of authors,
editors, translators, and readers - on one side, and on the other.. data centers, semiconductors,
mobile technology, expropriated software, power companies, and intellectual property.
The talk in the data center industry of the “industrialization” of the cloud refers to the scientific
approach to improving design, efficiency, and performance. But the term also recalls the basic
narrative of the Industrial Revolution: the movement from home-based manufacturing by hand to
large-scale production in factories. As desktop computers pass into obsolescence, we shift from a
networked, but small-scale, relationship to computation (think of “home publishing”) to a
reorganized form of production that puts the accumulated energy of millions to work through
these cloud companies and their modernized data centers.
What kind of buildings are these blank superstructures? Factories for the 21st century? An engineer
named Ken Patchett described the Facebook data center that way in a television interview, “This is
a factory. It’s just a different kind of factory than you might be used to.” Those factories that we’re
“used to,” continue to exist (at Foxconn, for instance) producing the infrastructure, under
recognizably exploitative conditions, for a “different kind of factory,” - a factory that extends far
beyond the walls of the data center.
But the idea of the factory is only part of the picture - this building is also a mine.. and the
dispersed workforce devote most of their waking hours to mining-in-reverse, packing it full of data,
under the expectation that someone - soon - will figure out how to pull out something valuable.
Both metaphors rely on the image of a mass of workers (dispersed as it may be) and leave a darker
and more difficult possibility: the data center is like the hydroelectric plant, damming up property,
sociality, creativity and knowledge, while engineers and financiers look for the algorithms to
release the accumulated cultural and social resources on demand, as profit.
This returns us to the interface, site of the struggles over the management and control of access to
property and infrastructure. Previously, these struggles were situated within the computer-object
and the implied freedom provided by its computation, storage, and possibilities for connection
with others. Now, however, the eviscerated device is more interface than object, and it is exactly
here at the interface that the new technological enclosures have taken form (for example, see
Apple's iOS products, Google's search box, and Amazon's "marketplace"). Control over the
interface is guaranteed by control over the entire techno-business stack: the distributed hardware
devices, centralized data centers, and the software that mediates the space between. Every major
technology corporation must now operate on all levels to protect against any loss.
There is a centripetal force to the cloud and this essay has been written in its irresistible pull. In
spite of the sheer mass of capital that is organized to produce this gravity and the seeming
insurmountability of it all, there is no chance that the system will absolutely manage and control
the noise within it. Riots break out on the factory floor; algorithmic trading wreaks havoc on the
stock market in an instant; data centers go offline; 100 million Facebook accounts are discovered
to be fake; the list will go on. These cracks in the interface don't point to any possible future, or
any desirable one, but they do draw attention to openings that might circumvent the logic of
access.
"What happens from there is another question." This is where I left things off in the text when I
finished it a year ago. It's a disappointing ending: we just have to invent ways of occupying the
destruction, violence and collapse that emerge out of economic inequality, global warming,
dismantled social welfare, and so on. And there's not much that's happened since then to make us
very optimistic - maybe here I only have to mention the NSA. But as I began with an ending, I
really should end at a beginning.
I think we were obliged to adopt a negative, critical position in response the cyber-utopianism of
the last almost 20 years, whether in its naive or cynical forms. We had to identify and theorize the
darker side of things. But it can become habitual, and when the dark side materializes, as it has
over the past few years - so that everyone knows the truth - then the obligation flips around,
doesn't it? To break out of habitual criticism as the tacit, defeated acceptance of what is. But, what
could be? Where do we find new political imaginaries? Not to ask what is the bright side, or what
can we do to cope, but what are the genuinely emancipatory possibilities that are somehow still
latent, buried under the present - or emerging within those ruptures in it? - - - I can't make it all
the way to a happy ending, to a happy beginning, but at least it's a beginning and not the end.