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commons-based in Bodo 2015

straints or limitations.

9

Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

scarcity in physical copies is overcome through distributed digitization; the artificial source of scarcity
created by copyright protection is overcome through infringement. The liberation from both constraints is
necessary to create a truly scarcity free environment and to release the potential of the library in the postscarcity age.
Aleph is also an ongoing demonstration of the fact that under the condition of non-scarcity, the library can
be a decentralized, distributed, commons-based institution created and maintained through peer
production (Benkler, 2006). The message of Aleph is clear: users left to their own devices, can produce a
library by themselves for themselves. In fact, users are the library. And when everyone has the means to
digitize, collect, catalogue and share his/her own library, then the library suddenly is everywhere. Small
individual and institutional collections are aggregated into Aleph, which, in turn is constantly fragmented
into smaller, local, individual collections as users download works from the collection. The library is
breathing (Battles, 2004) books in and out, but for the first time, this circulation of books is not a zero
sum game, but

commons-based in Constant 2015

always selfconscious of how you’re going to pay your rent and how you’re going to pay
your bills. It’s impossible to separate yourself from this context and if the
funding is coming from these directions you’re always going to self-censor
and it’s going to affect what you talk about in your choices that you make.
191

What to present, what not to present, where to place the emphasis where
not to place the emphasis, it will always be modified by the context you are
producing in. And if what you’re being paid for is essentially to make people
like SONY or make people like the state then it’s going to change the way
you present what you are doing.
Yochai Benkler used the term ‘commons-based peer production’ and of
course took great pains to avoid talking about communism and try to limit
this only to information production. He’s very clear, for him this is not for
real material production. Because he’s a liberal lawyer, working for a major
university, in the states ... so this is how he presents his work.
But what this means, commons-based production, means that the instruments of production are actually collectively owned but controlled by the
direct producers, which means that nobody can actually earn money simply by owning the instruments of production. You can only earn money
by employing the instruments of production in actually making something.
So, commons-based peer production. You have common things like instruments of production, land and capital, they’re are commonly controlled and
commonly owned, and individual labour of peers is applied to that shared
commons and the results of that labour is then owned by the actual producers. None of that product is owned by the people who are simply owning
instruments of production. That is what is meant by commons-based peer
production. But that’s exactly what the anarchist and the socialist call communism. There is no actual difference. Communism in a text book example
is the state less, property-less society. And that’s what it means, commonsbased peer production is a neologism, a modern way of saying communism
because for political reasons, post-war rhetoric, these words are verboten
and you can’t say them. So people invent new words, but they’re saying
exactly the same things. The point is that producers require land and capital to produce. If certain private interest controls all of the access of direct
producers to land and capital, then those private interests can extract the
surplus value. Another great quote from Benjamin Tucker is whenever one
person earns without sweating ... ehm sorry, whenever one person earns without
sweating, another person sweats without earning and that’s fundamentally true.
If anybody is earning revenue simply by owning instruments of production,
that means that people actually producing are not capturing the value of
their labour. And that’s what commons-based peer production is. The idea
that we have a commons which is all of our property, nobody controls our
instruments of production, they’re all our property together. Each of us
192

have our labour and we apply that to the commons and we produce something and whatever we produce, that is ours. It’s our own, provided that we
are not taking anything away from anybody else, provided that we are not
taking any exclusive control of the commons.
In the case of Free Software development, the Free Software itself is a commons. But things that you might make with Free Software are not part of
the commons, they’re your own. But the problem with software itself is
that because software is immaterial and therefore has no reproduction costs,
it can be reproduced with no costs, it also has no exchange value. So in
order to convert it to exchange value you always have to apply other forms of
property: land, capital, hard fixed property ... And so, as commons-based
peer producers in the Yochai Benkler world, we have our little internal communism, but we can neither live in it nor feed ourselves with it. So in order
to actually sustain ourselves, to actually capture our material subsistence, we
then have to deal with people that own land an capital; fixed, scarce properties, and we have no leverage in that negotiation. The only things we can
get back from the people that consume the output of our labour, is our
reproduction costs and nothing more, while they continue to capture and
accumulate the extra value. Again, how that applies to design is another
thing, I don’t think you can isolate one kind of worker from the overall
thing. The point is you ha

...

Seems incredibly difficult ...

If it was easy then capitalism would have been overthrown centuries ago

193

... You’re now owning a magazine already with a couple of people. The
next person asks you to design a beer label ...
You have to own the beer factory!

... And I think next you should own the paper company that makes ...

And then you need people and say I know how to make design, I need
some people who know how to make beer. So then we have a beer factory.
And then you need people who drink the beer! Who’s going to make the
people that drink the beer?
Haha.

But wait, there must be a little bit of difference, a modified option to
this. For example ...

In the scenario of commons-based peer production it’s not that the designers have to own the beer factory, it’s just that there can’t be any capitalist
in the middle that owns the land, it’s enough if the designers and the beer
makers both own the land together and the capital together ...
So if the beer company is also worker-owned and you come to an arrangement ... Isn’t it the idea of shares? Applying labour and therefore having shares on something ...

Yes, but it has to be equal. Shares in a capitalist system are unequal.
That’s the idea of copy-far-left. It’s the idea of a public license that allows
free use for non-alienated forms of production and denies free use for alienated forms of production. In the case of software, for instance, which is
not the greatest application of copy-far-left, but is a good example to understand, the software would be usable by a workers’ cooperative for free
but a private corporation employing wage labour and private capital couldn’t
use it for free. They would have to either not use it at all or negotiate a
different set of terms under which they could use it. So the question is
how do we remove coercive property relationships. If you really have a situation of commons-based peer production, or communism, where there is
no state, no property, the instruments of production are collectively owned,
people just work together in a very kind of free way, than it could certainly
work. But that’s not the world we are living in, so we have to be defensive
of our commons and how we produce in order for it to grow. We have
to think about where the exchange value is and think about where the use
194

value crosses into exchange value and make sure that the point is within our
boundary. If we can do that, that’s enough. If we have a worker-owned
design collective that works with a worker-owned beer company, that’s as
good as together owning a beer company. But only if they also live on land
and apartments that are also worker-owned, because otherwise the landlord will simply capture value; you have to look for the point of leakage.
Even with a workers’ design company and a workers’ beer company living
in Brussels renting from capitalist, then the people that own the apartment
and the land will simply capture all the surplus value. The surplus value
will always leak at the point of scarcity, so the system has to be complete,
what Marcel Mauss calls a ‘total system’. It has to be a total system, if it
is not, if the entire cycle of production doesn’t go through commons-based
peer production hands, then it’s going to leak at the first point of scarcity.
Then whoever privately controls the one scarce resource through which all
this cycle of production goes through, will capture all the surplus value.
Again, back to our very basic model. The price of anything is its reproduction cost, so the price of something that is immaterial is zero. So, since
the beginning of mechanical reproduction, property-based interest groups
have tried to create artificial barriers to production. When you have artificial
barriers to reproduction the immaterial assets start to behave like material
assets; this is where copyright and intellectual property come from. It’s
the desire of

commons-based in Mars & Medak 2017

inst the challenge of free software such
as ‘tivoizations’ (systems that incorporate copyleft-based software but impose
hardware restrictions to software modification), ‘walled gardens’ (systems where
carriers or service providers control applications, content and media, while
preventing them from interacting with the wider Internet ecosystem), ‘software-asa-service’ (systems where software is hosted centrally and licensed through
subscription). In order to support these strategies of enclosure and turn them into
profit, Silicon Valley developed investment strategies of venture capital or
leveraged buyouts by private equity to close the proprietary void left after the
success of commons-based peer production projects, where a large number of
people develop software collaboratively over the Internet without the exclusion by
property (Benkler, 2006).
There was a period when it seemed that cultural workers, artists and hackers
would follow the successful model of the Free Software Movement and build a
universal commons-based platform for peer produced, shared and distributed
culture, art, science and knowledge – that was the time of the Creative Commons
movement. But that vision never materialized. It did not help, either, that start-ups
with no business models whatsoever (e.g. De.lic.io.us (bookmarks), Flickr
(photos), Youtube (videos), Google Reader (RSS aggregator), Blogspot, and
others) were happy to give their services for free, let contributors use Creative
252

KNOWLEDGE COMMONS AND ACTIVIST PEDAGOGIES

Commons licences (mostly on the side of licenses limiting commercial use and
adaptations), let news curators share and aggregate relevant content, and let Time
magazine claim that “You” (meaning “

ctual property regime have brought about tremendous economic, social,
political and institutional crisis and deadlock(s). Therefore, we need to revisit and
rethink our politics, strategies and tactics. We could perhaps find inspiration in the
world of free software production, where it seems that common effort, courage and
charming obstinacy are able to build alternative tools and infrastructures. Yet, this
model might be insufficient for the whole scope of crisis facing knowledge
production and dissemination. The aforementioned corporate appropriations of free
software such as ‘tivoizations,’ ‘walled gardens,’ ‘software-as-a-service’ etc. bring
about the problem of longevity of commons-based peer-production.
Furthermore, the sense of entitlement for building alternatives to dominant
modes of oppression can only arrive at the close proximity to capitalist centres of
power. The periphery (of capitalism), in contrast, relies on strategies of ‘stealing’
and bypassing socio-economic barriers by refusing to submit to the harmonized
regulation that sets the frame for global economic exchange. If we honestly look
back and try to compare the achievements of digital piracy vs. the achievements of
reformist Creative Commons, it is obvious that the struggle for access to
knowledge is still alive mostly because of piracy.
PJ & AK: This brings us to the struggle against (knowledge as) pri

commons-based in Stalder 2018

esistance that have arisen in
response to these new challenges, one could be tempted to concur with
Bauman\'s pessimistic conclusion about the irrelevance of freedom,
especially if post-democracy were the only concrete political tendency
of the digital condition. But it is not. There is a second political
trend taking place, though it is not quite as well
developed.[]{#Page_151 type="pagebreak" title="151"}
:::
:::

::: {.section}
Commons {#c3-sec-0011}
-------

The digital condition includes not only post-democratic structures in
more areas of life; it is also characterized by the development of a new
manner of production. As early as 2002, the legal scholar Yochai Benkler
coined the term "commons-based peer production" to describe the
development in question.[^66^](#c3-note-0066){#c3-note-0066a} Together,
Benkler\'s peers form what I have referred to as "communal formations":
people joining forces voluntarily and on a fundamentally even playing
field in order to pursue common goals. Benkler enhances this idea with
reference to the constitutive role of the commons for many of these
communal formations.

As such, commons are neither new nor specifically Western. They exist in
many cultural traditions, and thus the term is used in a wide variety of
ways.[^67^](#c3-note-0067){#c3-note-0067a} In what follows, I will
distinguish between three different dimensions. The first of these
involves "co

"pagebreak"
title="153"}This typically involves weaving together a variety of
economic, social, cultural, and technical dimensions. Commons realize an
alternative to the classical separation of spheres that is so typical of
our modern economy and society. The economy is not understood here as an
independent realm that functions according to a different set of rules
and with externalities, but rather as one facet of a complex and
comprehensive phenomenon with intertwining commercial, social, ethical,
ecological, and cultural dimensions.

It is impossible to determine how the interplay between these three
dimensions generally solidifies into concrete institutions.
Historically, many different commons-based institutions were developed,
and their number and variety have only increased under the digital
condition. Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in
Economics for her work on the commons, has thus refrained from
formulating a general model for
them.[^69^](#c3-note-0069){#c3-note-0069a} Instead, she has identified a
series of fundamental challenges for which all commoners have to devise
their own solutions.[^70^](#c3-note-0070){#c3-note-0070a} For example,
the membership of a group that communally uses a particular resource
must be defined and, if necessary, limited. Especially in the case of
material resources, such as pastures on which several people keep their
animals, it is i

commons-based in Tenen & Foxman 2014

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 si

arts 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 aggr

commons-based in Thylstrup 2019

ration with Russia’s lack of access to up-
to-date and affordable Western works.11 As they continued to grow and gain in
popularity, shadow libraries thus became not only points of access, but also
signs of infrastructural failure in the formal library system.12 After lib.ru
outgrew its initial server storage at Moshkov’s institute, Moshkov divided it
into smaller segments that were then distributed, leaving only the Russian
literary classics on the original site.13 Neighboring sites hosted other
genres, ranging from user-generated texts and fan fiction on a shadow site
called [samizdat.lib.ru](http://samizdat.lib.ru) to academic books in a shadow
library titled Kolkhoz, named after the commons-based agricultural cooperative
of the early Soviet era and curated and managed by “amateur librarians.”14 The
steadily accumulating numbers of added works, digital distributors, and online
access points expanded not only the range of the shadow collections, but also
their networked affordances. Lib.ru and its offshoots thus grew into an
influential node in the global mass digitization landscape, attracting both
political and legal attention.

### Lib.ru and the Law

Until 2004, lib.ru deployed a practice of handling copyright complaints by
simply removing works at the first request from the authors.15 But in 2004 the
library received its first significant copyright claim from the big Russian
p

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