doll_yoko's blog

The Cost of Knowledge campaign: the commodification & liberation of academic research

doll_yoko — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 07:45:27 +0000

English

Technopolitics

We humans are thinking, speaking creatures, with a theoretically limitless capacity to analyse the world around us, and, if we are lucky, to also make sense of our own internal worlds. Under informational capitalism an elite class of 'thought robbers' exploit our mental and affective capacities. We, and especially the untenured 'we', the indy intellectual 'we', or the cultural activist 'we', toil at our texts only to perhaps then witness them being padlocked inside hierarchies of knowledge which we cannot afford to access. The 'University Inc.' or 'edu-factory' and its co-dependent sibling, academic publishing, siphon the worst qualities of managerialism and profiteering to support systemised structures of knowledge enclosures. In response, the cognitariat have started to rebel. In 2012 a mathematician blogged the withdrawal of his labour from the Elsevier academic behemoth. His stance triggered worldwide solidarity. While the unfolding narrative of grassroots mobilisation resonates with the official, overly earnest Open Access movement, it seems to hold more anarchic possibilities for the cooperative creation of unfettered systems of production and exchange of knowledge.

Universities are complicit in maintaining and extending hierarchies of exclusion. Academic work possesses all the ‘basic characteristics’ of what post-Autonomist theorists term ‘immaterial labour,’ that is, cooperative labour, grounded in the social, which produces ideas, symbols, relationships, and affects (De Angelis & Harvie 2009: 6). Such ‘biopolitical’ labour is the paradigmatic form of work within informatised societies. It opens up the human mind as a new territory of capitalist accumulation by harnessing and exploiting workers’ innate capacities for generating thought and language which are then translated into cultural and other materials. The ‘widespread' trend of 'education restructuring’ since the 1970s has transformed universities into a ‘terrain for marketisation agendas’ (De Angelis & Harvie 2009: 7). Increasing casualisation and bureaucratisation means that fewer people are paid adequately (or at all) for thinking, researching, writing and editing. Yet researchers must ‘publish or perish,’ and so strive to disseminate output via the most prestigious channels, thereby becoming unpaid sources of profit for academic publishers who depend on the ‘private appropriation of public labour’ (Pirie 2009: 32).

‘Mobiles Büro' created by Austrian architect and designer Hans Hollein in 1969

Yet who else in the publishing food chain (lawyers, insurers, printers, distributors, clerical support, cleaners, and so forth) works for free? The rationale is that payment is returned in the form of academic reputation which increases employment prospects, an increasingly dubious proposition especially given the over-supply of graduates in many regions. Indeed, the realisation by tertiary students, teaching assistants, and interns that their education debts might never be repaid is contributing to the increasingly organised, globalised, and translocally networked rolling waves of university protests and occupations (The Edu-Factory Collective, 2009).

The economics of academic publishing and the rise of the Open Access movement

The similarities that exist between the digital entertainment usage rights wielded by Big Content and those imposed by academic publishers illustrate how contemporary struggles around knowledge and property in different informational domains are interconnected. Publishers can typically charge those not affiliated with a fee-paying university or library between USD 30-40 for the right to read one journal paper, (frequently also placing a time limit of 24 hours access to the paper), a paper for which the author, peer reviewers, and editors were paid nothing for their ideas and intellectual labour. Such ‘economic parasitism’ exemplifies ‘pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it,’ according to journalist George Monbiot (2011).

However, as with file-sharing, researchers have begun resisting what they consider to be unfair anachronistic monopolies. A growing number are collectively withdrawing their labour and establishing alternative ‘open access’ (OA) systems of production and exchange in the form of OA journals and data repositories, harnessing Internet technologies to do so, as we will discuss. The growing quantity of accessible resources linked to the two main OA repositories, OpenDOAR (2012) with 2,195 e-journals, databases, and libraries, and ROAR (2012) with 2,924, are testament to how researchers and institutions are changing their own publishing and collecting practices and associated attitudes about research prestige and impact. And like the flow-on effects to national legislation and international treaties which the ‘copyfight’ has propelled, their aggregated actions have similarly propelled some significant changes in legislation, government policy, and corporate business practices. Open is the new black. Open is sexy. However, Open is not particularly queer. Frankly, it's just not that interesting, being more assimilationist than antagonistic.

Moreover, just as file-sharing created new markets for ancillary services such as VPNs, so to has the open access movement spawned a market or user base for other services, exemplified by projects like SHERPA (2012a) that not only manages OpenDOAR but also aggregates information about publishers’ and funders’ (often conflicting) OA policies. The growth of ‘open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research’ signals the formation of new informational flows and orders, which will inevitably experience disordering tendencies themselves (ibid., emphasis added). Like the free software movement, for example, the open access movement is underpinned and indeed driven by its own hierarchies of information and power which over time become entrenched. OA positions itself as being a staunch upholder of, rather than challenger to, existing copyright regimes, as the following statement by the Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Peter Suber (2012), demonstrates:

(1) OA is not Napster for science. It's about lawful sharing, not sharing in disregard of law. (2) OA to copyrighted works is voluntary, even if it is sometimes a condition of a voluntary contract, such as an employment or funding contract. There is no vigilante OA, no infringing, expropriating, or piratical OA.

No 'piratical OA,' well, where's the fun in that? It's sounding pretty frumpy.

So the OA orthodoxy itself appears to be based upon a strict dogma allowing only one form of partially-decommodified access, rather than embracing the uncertainty of plurality. One might suspect that a new OA elite is carving out a niche for itself, insisting on another regime of informational order, replicating the old functions of segregation and exclusion. Or perhaps we are being too cynical. In this case study we step back from the history of open access to examine a recent example from the field of scientific publishing. It highlights some of the antagonisms that continue to fuel the OA movement, and, importantly, presents a snapshot of the affective dimensions to the collective struggle for open forms of knowledge exchange, at a point in time before these frustrations and desires have been subsumed by the new informational order of OA.

Since academic publishers began adopting electronic publishing around 1995 they have increasingly bundled together prestigious and little-wanted journals, and maintained ‘artificially high prices for pay-per-view and individual subscriptions,’ explains economist Ted Bergstrom (2010: 8). (Title bundling is analogous to the much criticised business model of cable TV where subscribers must pay companies like Foxtel to access 100s of channels they might not want rather than being able to buy cheaper subscriptions to individual shows or channels.) In a significant historical critique, Jean-Claude Guédon (2001) tracked how over the past 50 years publishers have transformed ‘scholarly journals—traditionally, a secondary, unpromising publishing venture at best—into big business.’ In so doing they radically changed the ‘status of the “document” and the ways in which individuals may interact,’ and also ‘deeply subvert’ the role of libraries (ibid.). Publishers have become accustomed to having the upper hand, negotiating individual, highly secretive multi-year ‘Big Deal’ contracts with each library or national consortia (Gowers, 2012b: 2), most of which have been unable to lower prices with a few exceptions like Stanford, Caltech, and the University of Wisconsin whose ‘hard bargaining’ forced better deals (Bergstrom, 2010: 4, 8). Exacerbating libraries’ financial burden has been the compounded annual increase in subscription fees built into in the Big Deals. Institutions who signed 5-year contracts with Elsevier in 1999, for example, experienced ‘a 40% increase in the subscription price over the life of the contract’ (whereas the US Consumer Price Index rose only by 13%), and if they renewed it faced ‘continued annual price increases of between 5% and 6%’ (ibid. 4). With ‘many libraries’ now having signed their third round of contracts, upon expiry between 2012-2014 these universities will be paying ‘almost twice as much in real terms as they paid for the Big Deal in 1999’ (ibid.). This production and distribution model based on extreme exploitation of raw materials (human cognitive and communicative capacities), inelastic pricing mechanisms, and exclusive copyright licenses limits the spread of knowledge. This in turn stunts how new knowledge can be built upon and by whom, much as the patent system does, leaving not much to grin about.

From Tove Jansson's (Finn Family Moomintroll) illustrated 'Alice in Wonderland'

In the UK there has been little academic research to develop a ‘critical political economy’ of academic publishing, leaving analysis to ‘politicians and the major charitable foundations that support scientific enquiry’ (Pirie, 2009: 32). For example, the Wellcome Trust commissioned a study to compare the ‘subscriber-pays’ and an ‘author-pays’ (where the author/funder/institution pays for the ‘publishing services’ but where the final paper is published in an online open access journal, for free) models (SQW Limited, 2004: iii). Wellcome’s starting proposition was that an ‘organised’ and equitable information ordering regime for the ‘output of scientific endeavour’ is an ‘important activity for any sophisticated society’ (17). The final report concluded that an author-pays model was a ‘viable alternative’ which could deliver ‘high-quality, peer-reviewed research at a cost...significantly less than the traditional model while bringing with it a number of additional benefits’.1 However, the economic motifs of self-funding publication can undermine a work’s status because of its similarity to “vanity publishing,” a tendency unacknowledged by the report. If the author must pay then they will get published irrespective of quality, just as fee-paying students usually get passed because of university management encouragement of, and sometimes overt pressure to, ‘soft mark’ their assignments. Self-publishing sets up a class system between well endowed and poor authors.

In academic publishing’s ‘complex’ dual market, supply and demand are determined by factors relating to ‘current research concerns and the quality of output’ whereas the associated commercial ‘shadow’ market is ‘relatively conventional,’ with publishers selling a product (journals) to libraries (SQW Limited 2004: 1). These publishers are not homogeneous as they combine ‘profit-maximising companies’ with other organisations ‘seeking a satisfactory profit or surplus’ (ibid.). Libraries with fixed budgets can only ‘respond to price’ by adjusting their purchases accordingly. If a library requires a specific journal for subscribers to be kept up to date with their field’s latest developments, it cannot purchase something similar from another publisher as these are unique goods with a defined status and cachet. For instance, the British medical journal The Lancet is nearly 200 years old, making it difficult for a potential rival publication to gain market purchase, unless there is a collective decision by researchers worldwide to redirect their labour to an agreed replacement journal.

However this begs the question of whether more equitable ways to disseminate new “reputable” knowledge can be created, just as the Internet-based Gutenberg Project disseminates “old” knowledge (Project Gutenberg, 2012). As the SQW report notes, ‘electronic archiving’ on the internet is relatively cheap and facilitates access to timely research outputs (17). The absence of an ‘efficient, centrally-funded electronic archive’ challenges traditional publishers’ relevancy, and a ‘de facto’ open archive offering ‘very cheap or free document delivery’ might organically emerge and become the global ‘norm’ (ibid, emphasis in original). The momentum generated by the Cost of Knowledge campaign suggests that this norm might develop sooner rather than later.

Disruptions to the info-order of academic publishing: The Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier

On 21 January 2012 a blog posting on this subject by eminent Cambridge mathematician Professor Tim Gowers generated a snowball effect, over time propelling more than 11,000 like-minded academics to withdraw their labour from one bastion of the ‘feudal powers’ Monbiot criticises (Chatterjee, 2012). The target was Dutch publisher Elsevier.

In 2009, despite the global recession and a ‘challenging academic budget environment,’ Elsevier, a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier (which owns Scopus citation database service and LexisNexis amongst numerous other holdings), reported revenue of £1,985m and a profit of £693m, an increase of 22% on the previous year’s figures (Reed Elsevier 2010: 5). By the year ending 31 December 2011 Elsevier’s total annual revenue had climbed to £2,058m, generating an adjusted operating profit of £768m, an increase of 6% from 2010 returns (Reed Elsevier 2012: 13). Although it predicted that underlying revenue growth would be ‘modest,’ it reported that sales of databases and tools had grown strongly, due to academic research becoming ‘increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative across geographies’ (ibid.). With a portfolio holdings totaling around 1,250 journals and 700 books in 2011, Elsevier describes itself as the ‘leading journal publisher in scientific publishing’ and hence it expects that it would ‘attract criticism...directed at publishing as a whole’ (Reed Elsevier 2012: 13; Hassink & Clark, 2012: 833). A handful of main players comprise the academic publishing oligopoly, and by August 2012 Elsevier (2012) was listing 2712 journals, 19,838 books, and 20 bibliographic databases on its website.

Tim Gowers’ (2012a) online cri de coeur entitled ‘Elsevier — my part in its downfall’ (a play on one of Spike Milligan’s book titles) expounded the publisher’s ‘heavily criticized’ business practices: their exorbitant prices, bundling of indispensable journals with inferior ones, ‘ruthless’ cutting off of libraries who attempt to negotiate better deals, and support for controversial intellectual property and copyright legislation such as the Research Works Act (RWA), which, like SOPA and PIPA, would restrict knowledge circulation. After examining the possible reasons why scholars might be complicit in supporting Elsevier (motivated by a perceived moral obligation to support the mathematics community by reviewing papers, for example), and determining that eventually (but not soon enough) the Internet itself would bring an end to the ‘abuses,’ Gowers decided that he would both ‘refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals’ and also publicly declare his disavowal. He argued that ‘the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it [a boycott] becomes,’ and suggested that someone create a website ‘where mathematicians who have decided not to contribute in any way to Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically’ (ibid.). Sidestepping the ‘moral argument’ about the privatisation of knowledge, Gowers focused on practical matters, saying ‘we have much greater bargaining power than we are wielding at the moment, for the very simple reason that we don’t actually need their services’ (ibid.). If enough scholars participated in the ‘powerful gesture’ of a boycott it might be ‘even powerful enough for other sciences to follow suit eventually’ (ibid.). Interestingly, Gowers did not speak of other informational fields in which the same forms of exploitation of cognitive and symbolic labour is rife, such as the arts and the humanities, although some practitioners from these fields would later participate in the proposed boycott.

Gowers’ post sparked an immediate online dialogue. 478 comments had been posted to his blog as of 21 August 2012 (most of them immediately following publication) from fellow mathematicians and scientists worldwide, indicating the globalised and cross-disciplinary nature of this particular manifestation of the knowledge enclosures. Indeed, this was not a new problem. As Ted Bergstrom (2001: 184-5) had noted in his paper ‘Free Labor for Costly Journals?’ in which he compared the costs and reputation of nonprofit and commercial journals in the economics field, that ‘while the nonprofits are supplying most of the information used by economists, the commercial presses are absorbing the lion’s share of library budgets.’ Thus intellectual resources that could be considered as belonging to the commons because of their relative affordability, were in danger of being abandoned because although nonprofit journals were significantly more-cited they nevertheless did not possess the same ‘prestige’ as the less-cited ‘price-gouging’ commercial journals (183, 197). Bergstrom’s solutions in 2001 had involved scholars educating themselves, and then both collectively redirecting their intellectual labour and also influencing their employing institutions’ purchasing decisions. Proposed actions included scholars themselves expanding the number of ‘elite’ and ‘specialised’ nonprofit journals, supporting the ‘reasonably priced new electronic economics journals’ which had already entered the field, and ‘punishing overpriced journals’ by participating in a ‘partial boycott’ against those identified in Bergstrom’s ‘rogues’ gallery’ (192-4). Such a boycott would include ‘cancellation of library subscriptions to overpriced journals,’ ‘defections by editors and editorial boards,’ mindful choices by authors of where they would publish, and a ‘referees’ boycott’ (194-6).

Eleven years later some of these recommendations were reiterated in the lengthy comments posted to Gowers’ blog article, as mathematicians and scientists detailed personal experiences of being exploited, and stating their opposition to ‘gating scholarly knowledge’ (ibid.). Some commenters posited how the ‘community of scholars’ itself could build a ‘new style of peer-review,’ for instance, by applying ‘some of the technologies and methods used now by many [web]sites to judge comments and replies’ (ibid.). Others flagged earlier campaigns within specific countries and disciplines against Elsevier and other major academic publishers including Springer and Wiley. For instance, in 2006 editors had deserted Elsevier’s The Journal of Economic Theory and in its stead launched the low cost journal Theoretical Economics, the venture supported through server space at the University of Toronto (UT), a permanent archive of published articles hosted at the UT Library, and typesetting costs covered by authors’ ‘modest’ submission fee of USD75 (Theoretical Economics 2012). Similarly, there have been other ‘mass resignations of entire Elsevier editorial boards over pricing concerns,’ with the Journal of Logic Programming (1999), the Journal of Algorithms (2003), and Topology (2006), spurring the mathematical community to found replacement journals such as The Journal of Topology (Arnold & Cohn, 2012: 828). Such examples demonstrate how disruption of an existing info-order (knowledge enclosure) can have productive effects (knowledge liberation). This highlights how the first phase of grassroots responses to academia’s knowledge enclosures tends to be differentiated and disaggregated, locally coordinated networked translocally, but not across disciplines. Certainly the Internet has been the core enabling techno-social assemblage in these scenarios.

On 22 January 2012, within just one day of Gower’s blog posting, mathematician and programmer Tyler Neylon (2012) announced that he had built a website called The Cost of Knowledge as the boycott’s electronic headquarters. By 26 January a commenter on another science blog had reviewed the website’s signatories, observing that ‘Very very prominent names in the mathematics community have shown up straight away and in such an extent that the tipping point where refereeing becomes significantly harder in certain subfields might already be within reach,’ underscoring how professional reputations can tactically enhance online campaigns’ impact and scale (Farrell 2012, comments).

12,856 researchers ‘from all subjects’ had signed the pledge as of 26 October 2012, with many adding their own commentary on what geologist John Faithfull described as the ‘appalling swindle’ perpetrated on ‘authors, libraries, the general public, and the bodies who fund public science’ (ibid, comments).

Thirty-four distinguished mathematicians published an online statement on 8 February 2012 presenting the issues that ‘confront the boycott movement,’ analysing the mechanics of academic publishing within the pre-electronic paradigm including in the types of cognitive labour involved in research and its dissemination, and considering the ‘significant’ transformations brought about by the transition to e-publishing (Gowers 2012b, emphasis added). So within just over a fortnight an idea shared on a blog had materialised into what some of its most high profile protagonists described as a ‘movement,’ albeit a movement that was ‘anything but monolithic’ as participants had ‘different goals’ in the short and long-term (ibid. 1, 4). This recognition of diverse motivations for, and forms of, participation in the boycott suggest that the phenomenon shares some of the qualities of New Social Movements (NSMs) that sociologists such as Alain Touraine (2008) describe. NSMs are bottom-up rather than top-down emergent phenomena, experiential rather than (solely) intellectual, embracing (a relative) plurality of attitudes and expressive actions that engage all the senses, and so forth. NSMs are evolutionary in nature, although they hold the potential to produce revolutionary change.

The boycotters had focused their ‘discontent’ on Elsevier rather than its competitors because of mathematicians’ ‘widespread feeling’ that this corporation was the ‘worst offender’ and ‘most egregious’ on all counts; within its medical titles, for example, it had scandalously repackaged sponsored articles from pharmaceutical companies in the guise of bona fide journal papers (ibid. 2-3; Goldacre, 2009). The signatories pointed out that prestigious journals’ reputations had been created through the labour of authors, referees, and editors who had worked ‘at no cost to the publishers’ over many years. Yet typically the journals’ names were owned by the publisher, which made it ‘difficult for the mathematical community to separate this valuable object that they have constructed from its present publisher’ (Gowers, 2012b: 2). This observation alludes to more than the simple corporate branding that is in itself an important profit driver in informational capitalism; this is about a brand’s (eg, Journal X) reputation that is grounded in the materiality of the cognitive and communicative labour through which it had earned its prestige, that is, on the contributions themselves and the integrity of the evaluation processes.

Some also also set up a Twitter account tagged ‘The Cost of Knowledge’ (2012), which as of 8 October 2012 had 915 followers and 264 tweets, most of which announced developments in various Open Access and Open Knowledge campaigns. While The Cost of Knowledge website served as a the primary online tool for gathering signatures and commentary supporting the Elsevier boycott, the Twitter feed broadened the conversation by highlighting other instances of the digital enclosures such as ACTA, thereby connecting specific concerns emanating from the fields of education and scientific research to other domains within info capitalism. Such interlinking reveals trends and patterns on a macro-level, while also providing important detail on the micro level.

Social media helps campaigns to build momentum, attract publicity and forge connections with other relevant counter-movements. A wiki page set up by quantum computing pioneer Michael Nielsen (2012) listed over 120 links to mainstream media as of mid-July 2012, including articles in Forbes, The New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and der Spiegel, as well as links to numerous blog articles, some news aggregators and responses by Elsevier. Scholars discussing the boycott on their own blogs attracted further commentary and links. A rich, expanding discursive mesh of information and opinions encompassing print and electronic formats was manifesting in the mediascape, building momentum by keeping the issue alive and broadening the public conversation to other instances of knowledge enclosures.

However, there was not a full consensus, as a minority expressed various reservations about the efficacy of the boycott. A neuroscientist worried that a ‘crucial set of publication outlets’ could be lost by ‘embargoing one company based on a handful of misdemeanors,’ thus ‘harming science’ (Farrell 2012, comments). Another scientist argued that there was ‘little value in disorganised science,’ indicating a belief that publishers were instrumental to the maintenance of quantifiable informational orders within specific domains of human inquiry (ibid.). For some objections were personal, such as another neuroscientist who flagged that to boycott ‘1/3 of my field’s journals’ would be tantamount to ‘career-suicide’ (ibid.). Others took a broader view, one for instance pointing out that in starting a journal ‘from scratch, the hard part is to get a brand value to start with, and this is no trivial work’ (ibid., emphasis added).

Much of the online discourse examined the larger issue of the commodification of knowledge. Academic publishers charged British universities around £200m annually to ‘access scientific journals, almost a tenth of the £2.2bn distributed to them by the government’ for conducting university research, Alok Jha (2012) from The Guardian reported in a substantial feature article. Moreover, the big publishers enjoyed ‘profit margins of 35% or more’ partially by obtaining their ‘raw materials’ for free, and even when they allowed scholars to lodge copies of their own papers on their universities’ archives, ‘draconian’ copyright restrictions often made ‘subsequent scientific inquiry without prior permission’ impossible (ibid.). Hence The Economist warned that ‘academic publishers might find they have a revolution on their hands’ if the boycott grew and transformed into an ‘Academic spring’ (Economist, 2012).

Some months later (probably coincidentally) the Motion Picture Association of America (2012: 20-21) reported that in the first half of 2012 Elsevier had issued more than ‘78,000 takedown notices regarding infringement of thousands of health sciences and science/technology journal articles.’ Although over 75% of the time websites had removed the offending articles (albeit sometimes tardily) it was ‘very common for the same article to reappear quickly, on the same or a related site’ (ibid.). Obviously Elsevier was ready to take action when it perceived that its own (notional) profits were being threatened, notwithstanding that, as with ‘pirated’ entertainment media, it is highly improbably that all 78,000 takedowns represented lost sales. Yet as Elsevier boycotter Linh H. Nguyen from the Hanoi Stock Exchange Research Center - Economics noted, profits in the academic publishing are almost entirely built on ‘progressively enclosing the research commons, thus effectively stealing from public knowledge’ (Neylon 2012, comments). As always in informational capitalism, social constructions of piracy and theft depend upon who is speaking, and to whom.

Returning to the Elsevier boycott, the mass exodus of scientific contributors from a key site of intellectual exploitation rapidly generated roll-on effects. Elsevier withdrew its support for the strongly contested Research Works Act (RWA) in the US Congress which would have prevented ‘taxpayer-funded research to be made freely accessible online’ (Chatterjee 2012). The RWA, along with SOPA and PIPA, has been described as ‘intellectual land-grab too far’ by IT writer Glyn Moody (2012), his use of metaphor underscoring how the concept of the commodification of human cognitive capacities has entered the public imagination in a way in which the relatively esoteric discourse of Autonomist theory on the same subject has not. If the Bill’s own sponsors had not subsequently withdrawn it in light of the ‘new and innovative model’ of open access publishing, it would have affected not only American researchers but scholars worldwide due to the internationalisation of research (Howard, 2012). As the British medical journal The Lancet stated, ‘Science is a public enterprise’ (Lancet 2012). Yet the RWA, fueled by libertarian ideology opposing governments mandating anything of a cultural or social nature, had sought to enclose knowledge which currently the US government required its state-funded research to be made free to the public one year after publication.

In the framework of informational capitalism corporate branding and reputation becomes increasingly important, as stock values can plummet in light of instantly transmitted negative perceptions and rumours. On 27 February 2012, perhaps astounded by the international momentum the boycott had generated in just one month, Elsevier (2012) issued an open letter to the mathematics community in which it stated its intention to lower base line pricing, to open the archives of 14 core mathematics journals ‘from four years after publication,’ and to withdraw its support for the RWA. Somewhat unconvincingly Elsevier claimed that its RWA withdrawal stemmed from listening not to the boycotters but to those ‘authors, editors, and reviewers’ who continued to work with it, reiterating that they wanted to play a ‘constructive role’ in the ‘broad discourse right now about how data sets can be made more broadly accessible’ (Howard 2012). In a second open letter dated 2 May 2012 Elsevier (2012) announced other changes to its publishing and pricing models, including expanding the open archives to 43 journals and increasing sponsored access to research for developing nations.

Then in June 2012 two of Elsevier’s senior publishing executives, Laura Hassink and David Clark (2012: 833), responded to the mathematics community via a piece the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, in which they firstly admitted that the company had not ‘done a good job communicating what we do’ and then addressed the concerns of ‘Professor Gowers’s protest’ (a reductive personalisation of the boycott in our view) about pricing, bundling and access. Elsevier claimed that its prices were ‘typically...lower than those of other mathematics publishers,’ bundling was not mandatory and furthermore its disappearance would have a ‘detrimental impact on access to the research literature,’ their titles were available in the poorest countries through the Research4Life program, and that mathematicians were free to post their manuscripts on the independent open access platform arXiv (834). They also admitted that the community’s ‘critical feedback’ on the RWA had been ‘very sobering’ for them (835).

It is hard not to assume that the self-mobilisation of thousands of scholars that had been triggered by Gower’s original blog posting and facilitated by Neylon’s construction of a web platform had not played some part in Elsevier’s movement towards a (still limited) form of open access. Here, as with some of the P2P facilitating platforms discussed earlier, tools and expertise embedded within the structures and flows of info capitalism had provided the means for new social formations to coalesce and mobilise. Individuals used Internet technology to announce their intentions and create a mass visibility. Emergence in the mediated sphere contextualised and dramatised their aggregated individual material actions of withdrawing ideas and labour from one part of the knowledge enclosures. This action had an immediate disordering effect on the domain of academic publishing, as thousands committed publicly to not publishing, refereeing and/or undertaking editorial work. Moreover, and this is significant, unlike some other provocations using the Internet (such as DDOS attacks by Anonymous for example, the Internet blackout days protesting treaties and legislation like ACTA and SOPA, or annual events such as (Adbusters') Buy Nothing Day), as the scholars’ actions were ongoing they could continue to destabilise the old publishing model. The exodus might not be a flash in the pan flash mob, but a collective action signaling the generation of a new informational order. This order would in the first instance co-exist with the old order, but as momentum inevitably gathers, perhaps it could supersede it.

However, as Moody (2012) notes, this was only the ‘most visible revolt in recent years’ against publishers’ ‘exorbitant profits’. At the ‘dawn of open access’ in 2000 the Public Library of Science (PLoS) had issued a comparable call, yet few of the 34,000 signatories would go on to actually boycott offending publishers (ibid.). This is the danger of so-called slacktivism, probably particularly with e-petitions (rather than a DDOS action for example), with its potential to persuade the mouse-clicker that an act of electronic civil disobedience does not necessarily need to be accompanied by associated embodied actions (such as refusal to materially participate in exploitative informational regimes). Yet PloS now publishes seven peer-reviewed open-access journals, and presumably many of its contributors, reviewers, and readers have transferred at least some of their intellectual labour to this outlet, a move with parallels to a boycott of existing platforms. However, PloS contributors pay for publishing, with standard authors’ fees ranging between US$1350 and US$2900, with exceptions made for writers from ‘Low and Lower Middle Income Countries’ and also for some individuals who request a fee waiver (Public Library of Science, 2012). Here is more evidence that the disruptive and disordering tendencies inherent within informationalism produce not chaos, but rather new ordering regimes that in many ways appear to replicate the hierarchies, classifications, and social boundaries of the old ordering regimes.

New austerity, new (or old?) info-orderings

Today an Open Access movement exists, one that perhaps has been propelled by a more generalised and popular groundswell against various legislative instruments and corporate practices restricting data and knowledge flows. Open Access shares some qualities with the general form of New Social Movements (NSMs), especially in that its program and demands are shaped by multiple agents who do not necessarily share the same political position on other issues. In other ways it differs from NSMs in that OA engages people on a purely intellectual level, rather than on an embodied, multi-sensory level. Its public statements reveal it to be earnestly serious rather than seriously playful or celebratory. But whatever it is, both “orthodox” OA and inchoate, prefigurative, and as yet still fluid campaigns like the Cost of Knowledge have agency in that they inspire and induce changes in the existing informational order. Just as in the case of file-sharing, when a shift occurs in the public imagination about rights to access to knowledge and cultural production, the old order cannot expect to go unchallenged. We give a couple of examples here.

In May 2012, in a speech to the AGM of the Publishers Association’s annual general meeting, UK Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts (2012), flagged the government’s move towards mandating open access policies. He described academic research as resembling not a ‘sausage machine’ but an ‘ecosystem with subtle and intricate interdependences.’ It was one of the UK’s ‘greatest economic assets’; 120,000 of the 1.7 million academic articles published worldwide came out of British research, and 400,000 were published in the UK. Although the UK did not have many academic libraries and research institutes, 5,000 of the world’s 23,000 peer-reviewed journals were published in the UK, making journals an ‘important export industry, with perhaps 80% of their revenues coming from sales abroad.’ Rather counter-intuitively, it was such success that had led the Coalition government (an increasingly awkward mashing of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) to introduce higher fees and loans which would be ‘repaid by graduates, despite the intense controversy, to ensure our universities are well funded even as public spending is being cut back.’ (ibid.)

Student debt is now recognised as a societal problem, at least by students and academics if not by universities’ upper management; in the US it has now passed credit card debt in total volume, according to non-partisan think tank Education Sector (Carey & Dillon, 2011). In the UK, the privatisation and marketisation of tertiary education has been in train since 1990. The 1998 reforms instituted ‘up-front means-tested tuition fees of £1,200’ (Dearden, Fitzsimons & Wyness, 2011: 9). This was followed by the Higher Education Act 2004 (implemented in 2006) ushering in a new level of expropriation via personal debt, as ‘variable tuition fees of up to £3,000’ were introduced (Callender 2012: 78). Following the government’s adoption of the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance’s recommendations, annual fees could rise to a maximum of £9000 from 2012 (Ibrahim, 2011: 415). This last economic and social assault sparked ‘high profile, nationally and locally organised student protests’ and a ‘wide geographical spread’ of university occupations around Britain in 2010-11 (ibid. 415, 418). In the post-Global Financial Crisis period, some national austerity measures also complemented a global ‘cost-sharing agenda’ within higher education, with reforms partially transferring the financial burden of the production of intellectual goods and services away from the State and onto individuals, to the benefit of both corporations (who prosper from research) and government.

However, perhaps motivated by the wish to deflect criticism around the exploitation and penury associated with students’ mounting debt burden, Willetts (ibid.) announced the government’s commitment to the ‘principle of public access to publicly-funded research results’ so as to ‘maximise the value and impact’ generated by UK research. Moreover, taxpayers (that is, investors) ‘should not be kept outside with their noses pressed to the window’ of an ‘exclusive’ academic space constructed by paywalls. Instead there must be a ‘right to roam freely’ across the publicly-funded UK research landscape. This would return scientific and commercial outcomes, just as the OA policies of the Human Genome Project and the US National Institute of Health had done. Tellingly, Willetts used the example of the music industry to warn academic publishers against clinging onto outdated business models. This industry had ‘lost out by trying to criminalise a generation of young people for file sharing,’ whereas companies ‘outside the music business such as Spotify and Apple, with iTunes’ had developed a ‘viable business model’ for online access. Eventually publishers would need to commit to ‘green’ or ‘gold’ standards, green being the requirement to ‘make research openly accessible within an agreed embargo period, and gold meaning that ‘research funding includes the costs of immediate open publication, thereby allowing for full and immediate open access while still providing revenue to publishers.’ The RoMEO database of publishers’ archiving policies currently uses a 4-tier system to delineate a more fine-grained set of options (SHERPA 2012b). Philanthropic medical science funder the Wellcome Trust has already adopted the gold standard, and it is anticipated others will follow.

The gold standard implies that State and philanthropic funds would now directly go to the multi-billion pound publishing oligopoly, rather than as in the current scenario where the support for this lucrative private enterprise comes in the form of researchers’ wages. OA journals often require authors themselves pay for the privilege of publishing, as noted earlier. So do we have more of the old model simply dressed in different clothing? Even if this is the case, the fact that a right-wing government appears to be going along with, if not setting the agenda for, key demands of the OA movement is significant, if only in that it might be recognising a new domain of accumulation and encouraging industry to jump in and somehow commodify the decommodification processes already in train before other agents have liberated the past and the future knowledge flows!

The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, photograph by Aisii

This possibility suggest that we should not assume that OA is necessarily a socially radical movement. Indeed, indications are that the opposite is true, that OA is just one more system for maintaining the status quo in a changing information society. As Suber (2012) notes, the OA campaign ‘focuses on literature that authors give to the world without expectation of payment.’ Therefore production is limited to those who already enjoy a high degree of economic and social privilege, probably already employed as intellectuals and researchers (albeit precariously), and whose ‘disinterested desire to advance knowledge’ comes with a ‘strong self-interest in career-building’ (ibid.). As always, the independent, non-affiliated researcher (of whom there are quite a few, especially in the arts and humanities) is left out in the cold, although she or he would be able to access the work of others now at no cost. By reducing costs for the publisher this ‘royalty-free literature’ ensures profits can still be extracted, if not through the payment of subscriptions anymore, then by the provision of other services for which people are willing to pay such as ‘priced add-ons or enhancements’ (ibid.).

Evidence exists that institutions themselves are beginning to adopt new modes of accessing and sharing research artefacts, which also requires that they rethink things that “stick” to research and researchers, like prestige, impact, and reputation. In April 2012 the Harvard Library announced that academic publishers had made the ‘scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,’ creating an ‘untenable situation’ for the library as its annual journal bill had climbed to $USD3.75m (Harvard Faculty Advisory Council, 2012). Without identifying specific culprits by name (and Elsevier would later publicly deny that Harvard had been referring to them), the press release revealed that prices for ‘online content from two providers’ had risen by 145% over the past six years, far exceeding the CPI. In light of such ‘prohibitive’ costs the library would change its subscriptions, and encouraged faculty and students to both lobby for change via their professional organisations, and to adjust their own publication practices in line with OA principles.

Also in April 2012 Open Book Publishers, a small non-profit publisher of peer-reviewed Humanities and Social Sciences books, made its entire catalogue available for free online viewing via Google Books, which was a landmark in UK academic publishing (Middleton 2012). Placing their business decision in the context of the ‘academic spring,’ they noted that profit-driven publishers overlooked much ‘valuable research coming from fields not considered to be ‘commercially viable.’ This not only impacted on academic jobs but gave the academic presses a ‘huge amount of power in setting our research agenda,’ a point seldom made in the OA discourse. Giving weight to our assertion that disordering of existing informational regimes of expropriation and accumulation opens up new avenues for both capitalist exploitation and also experimental anti-capitalist or alternative systems of social relations, Open Book Publishers announced their intention to ‘expand’ their operations by ‘moving into academic journals and educational resources.’

The mood for change, and the development of coordinated strategies and programs to realise it, is occurring on an international level. For instance, in July 2012 the European Commission’s (2012) Science in Society (SIS) Programme released a series of policies on access to scientific information, outlining the EC’s vision to ‘ensure economic growth and to address the societal challenges of the 21st century’ by optimising the ‘circulation and transfer of scientific knowledge among key stakeholders in European research’ (ibid.). In a similar vein, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC 2012) was formed to ‘correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.’

Recognising the ‘unprecedented opportunities created by the networked digital environment to advance the conduct of scholarship’ the organisation describes its role as a ‘catalyst for change,’ via advocacy, education, and business incubation pathways (ibid.). Although 800 institutions are members, most are from the global North with none from Africa or South America for example, suggesting perhaps that the oft-mentioned ‘digital divide’ exists even within supposedly socially progressive, internationalised ventures. Does this mean that regions which would arguably benefit the most from OA are doomed to be the next site of exploitation from what we might call “Big Publishing,” just as Big Tobacco has targeted unregulated countries such as Indonesia as other nations led by Australia restrict their marketing and distribution options? Certainly, this exclusion supports our suspicion that, like the free software movement, the OA movement will struggle to challenge info-capitalism (not that that is OA’s stated aim!) as long as it limits its scope to only established nodes within the heartlands of advanced technology.

Concluding thoughts

‘The only price to pay to get knowledge have [sic] to be intellectual effort not money,’ Moroccan social scientist Yousra Afailal Tribak commented on The Cost of Knowledge campaign website (Neylon 2012). This position, seemingly shared by the thousands of scientists, researchers, and other “knowledge workers” and “immaterial labourers who participated in that campaign, is at odds with the priorities of neoliberal informationalism which identifies, encloses, and exploits for private profit communicative and intellectual processes which previously were seen as belonging to the common. A range of technologies and legal instruments are fundamental to these commodification processes. As the academy is a major site of intellectual production, and therefore of commodification, it has also become the staging ground for knowledge and learning liberation movements, seeding new circuits of discourse and exchange.

As we have seen, capitalism not only creates new informational orders, but also inspires and propels the formation of counter-orders of informationalism, which might be spontaneous and chaotic, or coordinated and highly organised. Certainly there appears to be no overarching proscriptive political program or ideology linking the various manifestations although certain memes such as ‘open access’ or ‘open knowledge’ flow through many of them. Eventually, and sometimes quite rapidly, the info-capital nexus of corporate and State agents might milk these counter-orders for their ideas, and coopt their methods, content, and networks, in the inevitable tango of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. We can see this happening to some extent in the “official” Open Access movement, in which new organisations reap (albeitly not large) income from researchers who must still pay for the privilege of publishing in OA journals. Or in the government departments established to monitor institutional adherence to the new OA order.

However, we do not wish to be overly cynical about this dynamic, nor to suggest that exodus from sites of creative and intellectual exploitation is not worth the effort. Because although each intersecting or parallel ordering of the various informational regimes under the star of info-capital to some extent repeats some of the old limits and constraints, some at least hold the potential for collective experimentation and social organisation on small and large scales. The Internet plays a key role in this by aggregating voices, interlinking networks, and providing indexing and archiving spaces. Nevertheless, the need remains to create physical spaces in which teachers, learners and researchers can come together. For despite info-capitalism’s (somewhat desperate and last ditch?) promotion of expensive online learning courses and the like, it is moot whether these packaged educational experiences will ever be able to generate the excitement and energy of collective embodied intellectual endeavours unconstrained by inflated fees and managerialism. Yet again the Emperor has been caught wearing no clothes, and the hundreds of thousands of students who have been participating in the ‘anomalous wave’ protests, occupations, and teach-ins around the world perhaps are prefiguring what an alternative info-order might look like.

Ironic Note

The text above is a TNL-modded version of part of a chapter for a book entitled Disorder and the Disinformation Society: The Social Dynamics of Networks and Software by Jonathan Marshall, James Goodman, Didar Zowghi, and Francesca da Rimini. It was mainly written by me (FdR) with editorial input from JM; JG has now written a chapter intro which focuses on the managerialist turn of the university, but since I didn't write the intro, I omit it from this TNL remix. I also see the text as a companion piece to the JSTOR/US govt/Aaron Swartz narrative which I posted on TNL last year here. The Disorder & Disinfo book will be published by academic publisher, Routledge, in 2013. It will no doubt be over-priced. Maybe an e-copy will be available, who knows? Maybe it will turn up on aaaarg! And in the meantime I put this text here, at The Next Layer, where no doubt more ppl would read it than buyers of the book. As the saying goes, 'Fuck copyright, share the love'.

Thank you

Armin Medosch for creating a space for, and encouraging, this kind of writing at The Next Layer, Lisa Haskell for revitalising TNL's Drupal code, Jon Marshall for always helping to sharpen my thinking and writing, Brian Holmes for being Brian Holmes, and Glenn Mason for proofing the synopsis.

References

Arnold, D.N. & Cohn, H. (2012) Mathematicians Take a Stand. Notices of the American Mathematical Society 59 (6), pp. 828-33. Accessed at: http://www.ams.org/notices/201206/rtx120600828p.pdf
Bergstrom, T.C. (2001) Free Labor for Costly Journals? Journal of Economic Perspectives 15 (3), pp. 183-98. Accessed at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wf0r099
Bergstrom, T.C. (2010) Librarians and the terrible fix: economics of the Big Deal. Serials 23 (2), pp. 77-82. Accessed at: http://works.bepress.com/ted_bergstrom/111
Callender, C. (2012) The 2012/13 reforms of higher education in England: changing student finances and funding', in Kilkey M., Ramia G. & Farnsworth K. (eds.), Social Policy Review 24: Analysis and debate in social policy, 2012, The Policy Press, University of Bristol, Bristol, pp. 77-96.
Carey, K. & Dillon, E. (2011) Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success, 3 Aug. Accessed at http://staging.completionmatters.org/sites/default/files/debt_to_degree_...
Chatterjee, P. (2012) Elsevier Versus Wikipedia: Academics Revolt Against Giant Publisher. CorpWatch Blog, weblog, 11 May 2012. Accessed at: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15725
Critical Art Ensemble (1993) The Electronic Disturbance, Autonomedia: New York. Accessed at: http://www.critical-art.net/books/ted
Cryptome (2012) Cryptome. Accessed at: http://cryptome.org/#send
De Angelis, M. & Harvie, D. (2009) ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities. Historical Materialism 17 (3), pp. 3-30(28).
Dearden, L., Fitzsimons, E. & Wyness, G. (2011) The Impact of Tuition Fees and Support on University Participation in the UK. Institute for Fiscal Studies Working Papers, 5 Sep. 2011. Accessed at: http://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp1117.pdf
Deazley, R., Kretschmer, M. & Bently, L. (eds) (2012) Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright, Open Book Publishers: Cambridge, UK.
Economist (2012) 'The price of information', 4 Feb. Accessed at: http://www.economist.com/node/21545974
Edu-Factory Collective. (2009). Toward a Global Autonomous University. New York: Autonomedia.
Elsevier (2012) Browse Our Products By Subject. Accessed at: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/subject_area_browse.cws_home?collapseAl...
Elsevier (2012) Letter To The Mathematics Community. Accessed at: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/P11.cws_home/lettertothecommunity
European Commission (2012) Towards better access to scientific information: Boosting the benefits of public investments in research, 17 Jul. 2012. Accessed at: http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/era...
Farrell, H. (2012) Friends Really Don’t Let Friends Publish in Elsevier Journals. Crooked Timber, weblog, 26 Jan. Accessed at: http://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/11/friends-dont-let-friends-publish-in-...
Goldacre, B. (2009) ‘The danger of drugs … and data.’ The Guardian, 9 May. Accessed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bad-science-medical-...
Gowers, T. (2012a) Elsevier — my part in its downfall. Gowers's Weblog: Mathematics related discussions, weblog, 21 Jan. Accessed at: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall
Gowers, T. (2012b) The Cost of Knowledge. Accessed at: http://gowers.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/elsevierstatementfinal.pdf
Guédon, J.-C. (2001) In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing, Association of Research Libraries. Accessed at: http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/138guedon.shtml
Harvard Faculty Advisory Council (2012) Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing. Accessed at: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgr...
Hassink, L. & Clark, D. (2012,) Elsevier’s Response to the Mathematics Community. Notices of the American Mathematical Society 59 (6), pp. 833-5. Accessed at: http://www.ams.org/notices/201206/rtx120600833p.pdf
Howard, J. (2012) Legislation to Bar Public-Access Requirement on Federal Research Is Dead. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 Feb. Accessed at: http://chronicle.com/article/Legislation-to-Bar/130949
Ibrahim, J. (2011) The New Toll on Higher Education and the UK Student Revolts of 2010–2011. Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 10 (4), pp. 415-21.
Jha, A. (2012) 'Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution'. The Guardian, 9 Apr. Accessed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycot...
Lancet (2012) The Research Works Act: a damaging threat to science 379 (9813), p. 288. Accessed at: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960...
Middleton, T. (2012) Open Book Publishers releases “The Digital Public Domain”. Open Knowledge Foundation blog, weblog, Open Knowledge Foundation. Accessed at: http://blog.okfn.org/2012/04/24/open-book-publishers-releases-the-digita...
Monbiot, G. (2011) 'Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist'. The Guardian, 29 Aug. Accessed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-...
Moody, G. (2012) Will Academics' Boycott Of Elsevier Be The Tipping Point For Open Access -- Or Another Embarrassing Flop? TechDirt, 31 Jan. 2012. Accessed at: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120130/13030217589/will-academics-boy...
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) & Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) (2012) Submission to the office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, 12 Aug. 2012. Accessed at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/102735498/mpaa-riaa#download
Neylon, T. (2012) The Cost of Knowledge [website]. Accessed at: http://thecostofknowledge.com
Nielsen, M. (2012) The Cost of Knowledge. PolyMath [wiki] Accessed at: http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=The_cost_of_knowledge
Open Book Publishers (2012) Our Vision. Accessed at: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/4/1/our-vision
OpenDoar (2012) The Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR, University of Nottingham, Nottingham. Accessed at: http://www.opendoar.org
Pirie, I. (2009) The Political Economy of Academic Publishing. Historical Materialism 17 (3), pp. 31-60(30).
Project Gutenberg (2012) Free eBooks by Project Gutenberg. Accessed at: http://www.gutenberg.org
Public Library of Science (2012) Publication Fees. Accessed at: http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees
Reed Elsevier (2012) Annual Reports and Financial Statements. Accessed at: http://reporting.reedelsevier.com/staticreports/Reed_AR_2011.pdf
Reed Elsevier (2010) Results Announcement 2009. Accessed at: http://www.reedelsevier.com/mediacentre/pressreleases/Documents/2010/Ree...
ROAR (2012) Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), University of Southampton, Southampton. Accessed at: http://roar.eprints.org
Royal Society (2011) Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access. Accessed at: http://royalsociety.org/news/Royal-Society-journal-archive-made-permanen...
Sample, I. (2012) 'Harvard University says it can't afford journal publishers' prices'. The Guardian, 24 Apr. Accessed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal...
SHERPA (2012a) SHERPA, University of Nottingham, Nottingham. Accessed at: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk
SHERPA (2012b) SHERPA's RoMEO: Definitions and Terms. Accessed at: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/definitions.php?la=en&fIDnum=|&mode=simple&version=#colours
SPARC (2012) Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Accessed at: http://www.arl.org/sparc/index.shtml
SQW Limited (2004) Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishers, The Wellcome Trust: London.
Suber, P. (2012) Open Access Overview. Accessed at: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
TheCostOfKnowledge (2012) [twitter account] Accessed at: https://twitter.com/costofknowledge
Theoretical Economics (2012) Theoretical Economics: Journal History. Accessed at: http://econtheory.org/history.php
Touraine, A. (2008) An Introduction to the Study of Social Movements, in V. Ruggiero & N. Montagna (eds.) Social Movements: A Reader (pp. 212-217). London: Routledge.
Willetts, D. (2012) Public access to publicly-funded research. Accessed at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/david-willetts-public-access-to-rese...

Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring

doll_yoko — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:27:47 +0000

English

Technopolitics

What is often called ‘digital piracy’ is nowadays a mundane and everyday activity. As such, piracy is a commonplace disorder within the order of information capitalism; it is both created by the ubiquitous orders of information capitalism and suppressed by those orders. In the myriad points of view of its participants piracy represents an order which is implicit within contemporary life, which we will call ‘pirarchy’.

The attached chapter entitled ‘Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring: systemic disruption as everyday life’ by Francesca da Rimini and Jonathan Marshall was written for the book Piracy: Leakages from Modernity edited by Martin Fredriksson and James Arvanitakis (Litwin Press, USA, forthcoming 2012, http://litwinbooks.com/piracy.php).

From the Introduction
What is often called ‘digital piracy’ is nowadays a mundane and everyday activity. Peukert (2010, p.6) points out that millions of ordinary “good” people who would never steal a book, a CD or a DVD routinely “continue uploading and downloading”. Digital sharing “is an everyday practice by millions of people, and in that sense normal” (p.15). As such, piracy is a commonplace disorder within the order of information capitalism; it is both created by the ubiquitous orders of information capitalism and suppressed by those orders. In the myriad points of view of its participants piracy represents an order which is implicit within contemporary life, which we will call ‘pirarchy’.

For non-corporate producers it constitutes a way of distributing their work which threatens their ability to survive off that work, while potentially opening previously unavailable possibilities of acquiring income or status from their products or expertise. Many corporations see it simply as a disorder which threatens their future. We assert that pirarchy is a non-resolvable part of what we have elsewhere called the ‘information mess’ (Marshall, Goodman, Zhowghi, & da Rimini, Disinformation Society: the dynamics of networks and software , Routledge, New York, forthcoming).

There has been little interest in the ways that pirarchy derives from and becomes embedded in everyday social and informational life. This neglect may arise because of the illusion of privacy afforded by the software enabling pirarchy, because the drama of landmark legal cases eclipses ‘daily life’, because prospects of prosecution makes practitioners reluctant to share information with researchers, or finally because most theory assumes that important networks are robust while pirarchy is overtly unstable and uncertain. We attempt to describe some social characteristics of pirarchy, through consideration of the literature and news-stories about piracy, but mainly through interviews with self-identified file-sharers.

To read the entire paper download the attached PDF below.

File Attachment:

Attachment	Size
Piracy_is_Normal_and_boring_09.pdf	196.03 KB

The JSTOR Case - US Government v Aaron Swartz

doll_yoko — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 01:01:25 +0000

Although we have thus far discussed P2P file-sharing in terms of its most representative instances, that is, the exchange of materials drawn from popular culture, other artefact classes are also swapped, from pornography to ‘serious’ publications. Sometimes genre-specific events can bring into focus larger issues arising from cultural commodification, public domain contraction, and resultant counter actions and movements. For example, recently American digital activist Aaron Swartz allegedly downloaded a massive number of papers from the JSTOR academic database. Subsequently the United States Government brought unprecedented charges against him, claiming that he planned to release the material through P2P networks. This case demonstrates how even the spectre of unsubstantiated file-sharing can trigger disordering responses across informational domains (academia, publishing, policing, justice), some of which which might be more rooted in emotions (anger, fear, revenge, spite, etc.) than in pragmatic circumspection.

We will examine some elements of this data liberation tale with reference to two of our mess principles: Principle 4, ‘as information is easy to replicate, it can escape its confines,’ and Principle 5, ‘the information economy is a parasitic economy.’

JSTOR is a US-based not-for-profit organisation which aims to help ‘scholars, researchers, & students discover, use, and build upon a wide range content in a trusted digital archive’ ('JSTOR Fact Sheet' 2011). Established in 1995 it provides a gateway into over 1400 academic journals spanning 50 disciplines, doing so by licensing content from more than 800 publishers (ibid.). JSTOR is a bulk transmitter of information with its users downloading over 63 million articles in 2009. It is also an organisation which embraces the rhetoric of neoliberalism, and of neoliberalism’s artistic wunderkind, the creative industries. The project prominently declares that it uses ‘information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship’ ('JSTOR Home Page' 2011, emphasis added). It seems curious that a portal into specialised libraries would trumpet ‘productivity,’ a word which for many would evoke imagery of employer/employee conflict, union accords, and the exploitation of casualised ‘flexible’ labour. And indeed, JSTOR had already been the subject of some controversy regarding knowledge and property, periodically accused of assisting publishers’ exploitation of authors amongst other charges.

The structure of JSTOR’s pay-for-access model suggests that despite concessions for poorer countries, it nevertheless replicates old forms of elitist scholarship. It charges institutions (7,000 of them from over 150 countries) a fee for their students to access specific journals via the JSTOR portal, with 90% of these institutions being medium to very small schools ('JSTOR Fact Sheet' 2011). Although 14% of institutions receive free or reduced fees, the costs for most are extremely high. For example, in his Guardian article entitled 'Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist' George Monbiot (2011) notes that an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is USD3,792, other journals might cost USD10,000, and Elsevier's Biochimica et Biophysica Acta costs USD20,930. Journals consume 65% of academic libraries’ budgets, says Monbiot, forcing them to reduce book purchases. Unsurprisingly only around 50 North American public libraries are JSTOR members, which means that the bulk of the general population in this region are excluded from accessing such material. For individuals not linked to participating organisations access costs can be prohibitive, especially because the first stage of most research typically involves broad literature searches. Publishers themselves set the price per article accessed via the JSTOR database, and these range between USD31.50 (Elsevier) and USD42 (Wiley-Blackwell) (ibid.). Publishers’ profits are ‘astronomical’ with Elsevier’s profit margin for instance being 36% or UK£724m on revenues of UK£2bn (ibid.). The academic publishing market is an oligopoly fueled by acquisitions of smaller players; Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley ‘now publish 42% of journal articles’ (ibid.).

The corralling of academic research in general into the walled gardens of professional peer-reviewed journals is a clear example of how knowledge enclosures operate within information capitalism. Most research within academia is publicly funded, notwithstanding the increasing dependency of tertiary institutions upon corporate funds to co-finance industry-oriented projects). Yet the tangible outcomes of this research, the journal papers, are mostly privatised because they are published in publications requiring expensive subscriptions. So research costs are socialised, and research output privatised, accessible only to those who have a key to the gardens via institutional gateways.

Universities maintain and extend these hierarchies of exclusion. Academic work in general, note De Angelis, and Harvie (2009: 6) possesses ‘all the basic characteristics’ of what post-Autonomist theorists term ‘immaterial labour,’ that is, cooperative labour grounded in the social which produces ideas, symbols, relationships, and affects. Such ‘biopolitical’ labour is the paradigmatic form of work within informatised societies and opens new territories of exploitation of workers’ innately human capacities—for thought and language. ICTs mine, harness, and commoditise such output, assisted by legal instruments developed in pre-digital eras. The ‘widespread restructuring of education’ since the 1970s have seen universities become a ‘terrain for marketisation agendas’ (ibid. 7). To further this agenda they require their researchers to ‘publish or perish,’ with the imperative to disseminate output via the most prestigious journals and publishers.

The academic publishing machine can only function on the basis of incalculable amounts of non-remunerated labour. Although some researchers (increasingly less due to casualisation) are paid for the time it takes to write, peer-reviewers are not paid, and neither are many of the editors of anthologies and journal special issues. This model is based upon the ‘private appropriation of public labour,’ because although publishers value-add by taking on ‘copy editing, layout and design...the overwhelming majority of the labour involved in the process of producing a journal-article is given freely by academics employed by public institutions’ (Pirie 2009: 32) . Yet no-one else in the publishing food chain is working gratis. The rationale for this overt exploitation of those whom some refer to as the ‘cognitariat’ (ref) is that payment comes in the form of reputation, and enhanced reputation (amongst a relative elite who can afford to read one’s work) increases one’s employment prospects. This techno-social assemblage of ‘cognitive workers’ (the serfs and the overlords) and informatised systems of production and distribution provides an excellent demonstration of our fifth mess Principle, namely that ‘the information economy is a parasitic economy.’

A hesitation by the academy’s ‘precarious’ workers to rock the boat could explain why there has been little academic research to ‘develop a critical political economy of the process,’ leaving it to ‘politicians and the major charitable foundations that support scientific enquiry,’ in the United Kingdom at least, to commission reports on the current model’s ‘limitations’ (ibid.). For example, the Wellcome Trust (a philanthropic funder of scientific research) commissioned a study to compare the costs and benefits between a ‘subscriber-pays’ and an ‘author-pays’ model (‘where the author (or their funder or institution) pays for the publishing services but where the final paper is published in an open access journal, available for free via the Internet’) (SQW Limited 2004: iii). Wellcome’s starting proposition is that an ‘organised’ and equitable information ordering regime for the ‘output of scientific endeavour’ is an ‘important activity for any sophisticated society’ (17). The final report concluded that an author-pays model was a ‘viable alternative’ which could deliver ‘high-quality, peer-reviewed research at a cost...significantly less than the traditional model while bringing with it a number of additional benefits’ (iii).1

Although this report focused on scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals its findings are applicable across the spectrum of academic publishing. In this ‘complex’ dual market supply and demand are determined by ‘factors relating to current research concerns and the quality of output,’ whereas the associated commercial market ‘shadow[ing]’ the academic is ‘relatively conventional’ with publishers selling a product (journals) to libraries (SQW Limited 2004: 1). These publishers are not homogeneous as they combine ‘profit-maximising companies’ with other organisations ‘seeking a satisfactory profit or surplus’ (ibid.). The buyers are the libraries with fixed budgets who they can only ‘respond to price by increasing or reducing purchases’ until their limit is reached. Clearly competition operates differently in this system, because if a library requires a specific journal for its subscribers to be kept up to date with the latest developments, it cannot purchase something similar or identical from another publisher—these are unique goods. For instance, the British medical journal The Lancet is nearly 200 years old, and it would be difficult for a potential rival publication to gain purchase in the market.

However this fact begs the question of whether other more equitable ways to disseminate new knowledge in any field exist or can be created. As the report notes, ‘electronic archiving’ on the internet is relatively cheap and facilitates access to timely research outputs (17). The absence of an ‘efficient, centrally-funded electronic archive’ challenges traditional publishers’ relevancy in that a ‘de facto’ open archive offering ‘very cheap or free document delivery’ will emerge organically and become the global ‘norm’ (ibid, emphasis in original). Which returns us to the story of JSTOR, the privately-funded database which arguably does not offer affordable access to the treasure troves of multi-disciplinary research.

Aaron Swartz (b. 1986) is a young American programmer and and digital activist based in Cambridge, Massachussetts
bearing prodigious geek credentials. At age 14 he helped develop the technical specs for the RSS software for automating newsfeeds; later he co-founded the Reddit user-driven news aggregator platform/community, developed meta-data for the Creative Commons content licensing system, co-founded the Demand Progress digital activism organisation, and was a Fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Swartz’s credentials suggest that he belongs within the camp of technolibertarianism, an ideology promoting electronic freedom and individual rights which is strongly influenced by the broader libertarian ideals deeply rooted in the United States. The magazine WIRED is a classic example of technolibertarian thought. Technolibertarians take the first part of our third Mess Principle, namely that the ‘information society requires free, easy distribution of information’ while totally rejecting the second part, that it also requires ‘restrictions on information so as to create shortages, property and profit.’ They cludge together the entrepreneurial individualism of free markets with a digital utopianism and, it could be argued, a steadfast (and naïve) faith in the instrumentalist power of information.

Swartz’s (2008) ‘Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto’ released online exhorted activists to ‘fight back’ against the sequestering of scholarly papers and information behind paywalls. ‘It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture,’ the manifesto declared. Significantly, one of its goals announced that ‘We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks.’ Swartz enacted the spirit of these ideals a year later when he responded to an public appeal by open- government activist Carl Malamud. The State-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database system was running a free trial enabling people to download US court records without incurring the normal charges. Malamud believed that ‘putting the nation’s legal system behind a wall of cash and [technical] kludge’ separated citizens from the ‘operating system for democracy’ (Schwartz 2009). Consequently, Aaron Swartz wrote a PERL script which automated the downloading process, and retrieved ‘an estimated 20 percent of the entire database’ or almost 20 million documents (ibid.). This same script uploaded the files to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service where they could be publicly downloaded, although not in an easily searchable form. The Government Printing Office suspended the free trial and alerted the FBI that the PACER system had been ‘compromised’ (Singel 2009). The FBI investigated the mass download, and although no charges were laid Swartz was now on the government’s radar.

In the fall/winter period of 2010-2011 Aaron Swartz was alleged to have hacked into the network of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer archive to download in an ‘unauthorised fashion’ a ‘substantial portion’ (some 4 million articles) of JSTOR’s publisher partners’ content (‘JSTOR Statement: Misuse Incident and Criminal Case' 2011). JSTOR claimed that the content was ‘systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.’ To hack the database Swartz allegedly wrote a script in python, which he named keepgrabbing.py. JSTOR identified Swartz as the individual responsible, retrieved the digital content, and was assured that the ‘content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed’ (ibid.). Nevertheless the US Department of Justice (DOJ) commenced a criminal investigation and indicted Swartz on 19 July 2011, under the direction of the United States Attorney’s Office ('United States of America v Aaron Swartz' 2011). Swartz pleaded not guilty to all counts, and was released on USD100,000 unsecured bond. JSTOR reiterated that their aim was to secure the content, and that they ‘had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter’ (ibid.). Why then was the DOJ intent on bringing a case against Swartz, the potential consequences of which included a prison sentence of up to 35 years and a USD 1million fine?

Some possible answers might be revealed by returning to the conflictual relations between knowledge and property in the digital era, and the tension between the need for information to be free (as in unfettered) for social, technological and cultural innovation to flourish for the public good, and yet constrained to maintain profit for the private purse. The DOJ’s treatment of Swartz was likened to ‘trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library’ said David Segal from Demand Progress, implying that a natural thirst for knowledge was being criminalised (Morgan 2011). Reddit forum contributor mizhi (2011) focussed on the ‘outrageous’ practices by ‘data warehouses’ such as JSTOR and Elsevier which ‘lock up scientific knowledge,’ noting that these organisations exploit both authors and reviewers. Another Reddit contributor justinh_tx (2011) cynically commented ‘Hell, if he was a Wall Street CEO they'd just give him a bonus,’ alluding to those white-collar crimes which are permitted and even handsomely rewarded within information society compared to infractions by benevolent robbers.

The US government took the view that all property is equal, no matter its type, evoking images from earlier eras. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz asserted that ‘Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars (Valencia 2011). Ortiz brooked no trust with a potential Robin Hood defence, stating that theft is ‘equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away’ (ibid). The language used—crowbars, victims—evokes crimes against the person, the body, instilling a degree of anxiety about where this kind of theft could lead to. Steven D. Ricciardi, special agent in charge of the US Secret Service in New England described the Electronics Crimes Task Force as taking an ‘aggressive stance in the investigation of computer intrusions and other cyber crimes,’ stressing the imperative of cooperation amongst law enforcement agencies to ‘investigate and prevent this type of fraud’ (ibid.). This perspective shifts back to the spectre of white collar crime and fraud, implying that financial profit motives rather than political principles were the driving factors in this case.

What about the indictment itself? The DOJ ('United States of America v Aaron Swartz' 2011, emphasis added) described the offences in the following way:

Between September 24, 2010, and January 6, 2011, Swartz contrived to:
a. break into a restricted computer wiring closet at MIT;
b. access MIT’s network without authorization from a switch within that closet;
c. connect to JSTOR’s archive of digitized journal articles through MIT’s computer network;
d. use this access to download a major portion of JSTOR’s archive onto his computers and computer hard drives;
e. avoid MIT’s and JSTOR’s efforts to prevent this massive copying, measures which were directed at users generally and at Swartz’s illicit conduct specifically; and
f. elude detection and identification;

all with the purpose of distributing a significant proportion of JSTOR’s archive through one or more file-sharing sites.

While clearly the DOJ believe that enough direct evidence exists for them to bring a case against Swartz, there is no proof to support the allegation that Swartz’s intention was to distribute the materials via file-sharing sites. The only ‘evidence’ is circumstantial, residing in the words of Swartz’s Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto (2008). In this he states that ‘We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.’ (Initiatives such as LibraryPirate (2011) follow the spirit of this this idea, by enabling students to co-purchase time-limited digital rental copies of text books, and then stripping the DRM from the PDF files and releasing them as torrents (enigmax 2011)). While the DOJ has not publicly linked this passionate call to arms to its case against Swartz, other commentators have made the connection. For instance, Maria Bustillos (2011) writing for The Awl argued that the ‘Feds’ had been ‘waiting for a chance to go after him’ since his PACER download, because ‘perhaps a certain resentment lingered’ as they were then unable to press charges. Moreover Swartz was a ‘progressive activist and passionate champion of the free Internet and of open access,’ with Bustillos noting that his Manifesto had been removed from its website ‘apparently in response’ to the legal situation.

So here we have the spectre of the hacker seeding a kind of ‘data panic’ due to the loss of state/corporate control over individual and collective acts of data liberation. Other recent newsworthy data emancipation actions such as Wikileaks’ publication of the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the ‘Cablegate’ diplomatic cables, and Anonymous’s hack of internet security firm HB Gary have produced comparable states of panic and attempts at retribution by authorities (Greenwald 2011; Bright 2011). This returns us to a fundamental question: is the Swartz case yet another politically driven attempt to criminalise knowledge democratisation in order to uphold the larger status quo, or is it an effort to protect the IPR of copyright owners & intermediaries by applying criminal law to protect specific corporate interests?

In any highly mediated society the representation of protagonists embodying and enacting the dynamics of complex contested issues can influence public perception. In Swartz’s case quality American print media depicted him as a heroic figure. In a single New York Times (NYT) article (the conveniently photogenic) Aaron Swartz was described as a ‘respected Harvard researcher,’‘internet folk hero,’‘member of the Internet elite,’ and ‘civil liberties activist who crusades for open access to data’(Schwartz 2011). This was an elevation from his depiction by the same journalist as a ‘22-year-old Stanford dropout and entrepreneur’ two years earlier (Schwartz 2009). Another NYT journalist tagged him as a ‘free culture advocate’ and ‘not a run-of-the-mill hacking suspect’ (Cohen 2011). Influential digital culture magazine Wired described him as a ‘well-known coder and activist’ and a ‘general friend of Wired.com’ (Singel 2011). For Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald (2011) Swartz was a ‘copyright reform advocate.’ Across the Atlantic The Guardian described him as ‘Harvard's Aaron Swartz,’ a ‘self-styled digital Robin Hood,’ ‘well-known digital activist, the founder of online group Demand Progress and...a brilliant programmer’ (Adams 2011).

It is instructive to compare these highly positive depictions to those of another young data liberationist, the alleged leaker of US defence and diplomatic files, Bradley Manning, the recipient of ‘cruel and degrading treatment’ by the State (Greenwald 2011). The ‘common thread’ linking the Swartz and Manning ‘persecutions,’ says Greenwald, citing other recent instances also, is to ‘stifle meaningful dissent of any kind—especially civil disobedience—through intimidation and excessive punishment.’ The result is a ‘sprawling Surveillance State’ which recognises the power of the ‘free flow of information and communications enabled by new technologies’ are hence are ‘increasingly fixated on seizing control of it’ to ‘snuff [] out its potential’ for subverting the social order. Greenwald’s ongoing critique of the power dynamics within the United States’ version of informational capitalism highlights the fact that singular acts of information sharing, whether or not facilitated by P2P file-sharing systems, can have profound consequences, both for those parties directly involved, and the larger society to which they belong. The disproportionality of the penalty Swartz faces if convicted of the hacking felonies is comparable to the excessive fines imposed on alleged music file-sharer Jammie Rassett-Thomas in her long-running legal battle with the RIAA who now owes ‘$62,500 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of illegally sharing’ totaling USD 1.5 million (Sandoval 2010).

We will conclude this narrative of Swartz, JSTOR and the United States government with two examples of how the unfolding situation generated further disorder in the info domain. From below came a solidarity action in the form of a data dump of 18,592 scientific articles on The Pirate Bay (TPB). Inspired by Aaron Swartz’s arrest, in July 2011 American ‘technologist’ Gregory Maxwell posted a 32GB file of papers published before 1923 (and hence under US copyright law should now be in the public domain) (Lee 2011). In a kind of manifesto Maxwell (2011) explained that he had obtained these ‘historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a prestigious scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s’ some years earlier from JSTOR through ‘rather boring and lawful means;’ his fear that ‘paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR’ would have meted out ‘unjust legal harassment’ had previously prevented him from uploading them online. Although not identifying as an academic himself Maxwell demonstrates a thoughtful critique of the academic publishing system which perpetuates ‘dead business models’ and depends on the political passivity and ignorance of ‘those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals’ (ibid.). Copyright is a ‘legal fiction representing a narrow compromise’ in which people partially relinquish their ‘natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author’ in order to encourage original production. However, publishers ‘abuse’ this system to perpetuate their own businesses and use legal threats to ‘suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works.’ Thus they are ‘stealing from everyone else’ (ibid.).

Many Pirate Bay forum participants voiced their support for the action: ‘DL [and] seed just for the cause!,’ ‘I'm sure William Herschel [18th C astronomer] thanks you, as ..he would [have] enjoyed a larger audience than his research has been allowed,’ ‘science must never be a hostage to business,’ ‘let's jimmy this system open, and keep it as open as it can be,’ ‘a blow to those who would privatize humanity's birthright,’ and ‘the embodiment of what knowledge file sharing truly is.’ While probably many of those who downloaded the archive would have no immediate use for the contents, 2 months after its release 161 people were seeding it, a high ratio for such arcane material indicating that this was a ‘swarm’ of solidarity with the cause of open knowledge. Swedish anticopyright group Missionerande Kopimistsamfundet (the Missionary Church of Kopimism) expressed it thus: ‘Let science flow, through fiber an’ through copper. Let knowledge fly through our satellites and back. Let understanding be copied to each others minds, through dialogue and reading. Let scientific data be mailed, downloaded and uploaded’ (laxsill 2011).

Aaron Swartz never released the JSTOR documents he had allegedly acquired to the public domain, and so while his actions had caused some temporary disturbances to MIT’s and JSTOR’s computer networks the main direct outcomes would play out within the informational fields of the law, the media, and the academy. The ripple effect would however generate other outcomes in other fields, such as Maxwell’s direct action dump of paywalled materials onto the internet, where the document contents and Maxwell’s ‘manifesto’ proliferated across new networks further seeding arguments for open knowledge systems.

Finally, a recent action from above has further disordered the boundaries between private and public knowledge pathways. On 7 September 2011 JSTOR’s Managing Director Laura Brown (2011) announced that JSTOR was making selected journal content ‘freely available to the public for reading and downloading.’ These 500,000 newly-liberated articles published prior to 1923 in the US and prior to 1870 elsewhere represented approximately 6% of JSTOR’s total content. On one hand this could be regarded as a tokenistic act as the material excluded more contemporary output; however it could also be interpreted as an action which could inspire other copyright holders and publishers to review how to change their practices around the commodification of knowledge. JSTOR and some of their publishers had already been experimenting with initiatives targeting unaffiliated individuals wanting to access to content on JSTOR for individuals. The Swartz case had impacted on the timing of the Early Journal Content release, as JSTOR considered whether to ‘delay or accelerate this action, largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions’ about their motives, eventually deciding to proceed ‘in the best interest of our library and publisher partners, and students, scholars, and researchers everywhere’ (ibid.).

The Swartz/JSTOR/US government narrative exemplifies how an action in one informational domain can resonate across other domains, producing both disorder and new ordering attempts. Swartz’s keepgrabbing.py python script accerelated and massified the downloading process, but was implemented in a partially analog fashion, by Swartz allegedly entering an MIT server cupboard and attaching drives to the machines. There was an embodied performative aspect to his actions, the wearing of a basic disguise (a bike helmet). Satisfied that Swartz had not released the data to the public domain (thus not threatening their paywalled information business model) JSTOR did not want to the incident to migrate to the media sphere by pressing charges. However the State had different priorities, making an example of this transgression by applying extremely serious charges equivalent to those targeting hackers of military databases (see for example 'Free Gary McKinnon' 2011). This in turn generated pro-Swartz media coverage, with the news of the Swartz’s arrest inspiring Maxwell to conduct a direct action on The Pirate Bay, posting a manifesto about the commodification of knowledge and torrenting 1000s of arcane scientific files which continue to be seeded in solidarity. From this chaos JSTOR attempted to reinscribe some order by releasing a small tranche of free files, while maintaining their user-pays model.

Significantly, all of these events have occurred with little discussion about the larger context of user-pays education, where the converging currents of corporatisation, bureaucratisation, and informatisation of institutionalised higher education are rapidly changing how learning happens, and who are the real beneficiaries of these changes. In postings to the Institute of Distributed Creativity list, cultural critic and activist Brian Holmes (2011a, 2011b) describes a ‘knowledge economy that never became a knowledge society,’ in which ‘bloated’ and ‘corrupt’ universities play an important role in perpetuating this economy and the ‘neoliberal ideology’ underpinning it. American universities, Holmes claims, ‘massively manufacture, not only neoliberal subjectivities but also neoliberal policy and technology,’ and are severely compromised by the corporate and military funding upon which they have become dependent. Hence alternatives must come from below, from self-organised cooperative communicative autonomous initiatives sharing the intention to ‘start a revolution in the knowledge factory,’ beginning with a ‘critique that is turned toward action’ (ibid.). In a small way, Maxwell’s release of a manifesto and files to the swarm could be read as just that.

Note:
This first-draft text is part of a longer book chapter on peer-to-peer file-sharing for Marshall, J., Goodman, J., Zhowgi, D. & da Rimini, F. 2012 (under contract for January 2012), Disorder and the Disinformation Society: the dynamics of networks and software, Routledge.

Bibliography

Adams, R. 2011, 'Harvard's Aaron Swartz indicted on MIT hacking charges', The Guardian, 21 July 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/21/aaron-swartz-indicted-h....

Bustillos, M. 2011, 'Was Aaron Swartz Stealing?', The Awl, August 3 2011 http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing.

Bright, P. 2011, 'Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack', Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/anonymous-speaks-the-ins....

Brown, L. 2011, JSTOR–Free Access to Early Journal Content and Serving “Unaffiliated” Users, ITHAKA, http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor%E2%80%93free-access-early-....

Cohen, N. 2011, '‘Free Culture’ Advocate May Pay High Price', New York Times, 24 July 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/business/media/aaron-swartzs-web-activ....

De Angelis, M. & Harvie, D. 2009, 'Cognitive Capitalism' and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities', Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 3-30 (28).

'Free Gary McKinnon - or at least give him a fair trial in the United Kingdom' 2011, http://freegary.org.uk.

Greenwald, G. 2011, A prime aim of the growing Surveillance State, Salon, 19 August 2011 edn, Salon Media Group, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/19/surveillance.

Holmes, B. 2011a, DIY: nightmare for humanities, social sciences, media, Institute of Distributed Creativity, https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-September/004824.html.

Holmes, B. 2011b, DIY: nightmare for humanities, social sciences, media, Institute of Distributed Creativity, https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-September/004828.html.

'JSTOR Fact Sheet' 2011, JSTOR Fact Sheet, ITHAKA, http://about.jstor.org/sites/default/files/jstor-factsheet-20110610.pdf.

'JSTOR Home Page' 2011, JSTOR Home Page, ITHAKA, http://about.jstor.org.

'JSTOR Statement: Misuse Incident and Criminal Case' 2011, JSTOR Statement: Misuse Incident and Criminal Case, ITHAKA, http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor-statement-misuse-incident-....

laxsill 2011, A few holy words on the sacred actions on Greg Maxwell, Missionerande Kopimistsamfundet, http://kopimistsamfundet.se/blog/2011/07/21/a-few-holy-words-on-the-sacr....

Lee, T.B. 2011, 'Swartz supporter dumps 18,592 JSTOR docs on the Pirate Bay', Ars Technica, 21 July 2011, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/swartz-supporter-dumps-1....

Maxwell, G. 2011, 'Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society', The Pirate Bay, http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transa....

Monbiot, G. 2010, 'Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist', The Guardian (Comment is Free), 29 August 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-....

Morgan 2011, Federal Government Indicts Former Demand Progress Executive Director For Downloading Too Many Journal Articles, Demand Progress Blog, 19 July 2011, http://demandprogress.org/aaron.

Pirie, I. 2009, 'The Political Economy of Academic Publishing', Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 31-60(30).
Sandoval, G. 2010, 'Did Jammie Thomas case backfire on file sharers?', CNET News, 7 November 2010, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20021947-261.html?tag=mncol;txt.

Schwartz, J. 2009, 'An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy ', New York Times, 12 February 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html?.

Schwartz, J. 2011, 'Open-Access Advocate Is Arrested for Huge Download', New York Times, 19 July 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/us/20compute.html.

Singel, R. 2009, 'FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records', Wired, viewed 23 September 2011 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/swartz-fbi.

Singel, R. 2011 'Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles', Wired, viewed 23 September 2011 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/swartz-arrest.

SQW Limited 2004, Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishers, the Wellcome Trust, http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtd003184.pdf.

Swartz, A. 2008, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, Paste Bin, http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy.

'United States of America v Aaron Swartz' 2011, United States District Court, http://web.mit.edu/bitbucket/Swartz,%20Aaron%20Indictment.pdf.

Valencia, M.J. 2011, 'Cambridge man accused of hacking MIT computers to steal 4m scientific papers', Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com/Boston/metrodesk/2011/07/cambridge-man-accused-hac....

Down by Law: HADOPI's diluted graduated response, iiNet's battle with Big Content

doll_yoko — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:30:27 +0000

Coordinated opposition had defanged the final version of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and will continue attacking other supra-national digital enclosures such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Hence powerful copyright advocates including the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) have concurrently operated outside such treaty frameworks to pressure individual governments in an ‘especially aggressive’ way to force ISPs to police copyright infringements (Bridy 2010: 2). To date Britain, France, South Korea, and Taiwan, have incorporated various forms of graduated response into their domestic copyright enforcement systems (ibid.). Furthermore, other countries are exploring ‘private ordering’ options to enforce online copyright (Bridy 2010: 11-15; Toner 2011). These range from ‘cooperative relationships’ between major content distributors and broadband providers in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) suspend repeat infringers’ accounts (in the United States), to ISPs being the ‘sole arbiter of the customer’s innocence or guilt’ terminating accounts without court orders (in Ireland). In Australia, the ISP iiNet after winning a precedent-setting law suit brought against it by an alliance of mainly US content owners proposed a graduated response model in which an ‘independent body’ meeting ‘community standards’ mediates the interests of all parties

(posting by Steve Dalby in 'iiNet vs AFACT Federal court judgment - part 2' 2011 forum). Evidently ACTA at least has convinced many governments, their judiciaries, and technical facilitators that Big Content is boss (see, for example, EMI Records (Ireland) Ltd & Ors v. Eircom Ltd & Anor, [2005]).

Anachronistic Romantic and Modernist arguments spotlighting the struggling lone artist are frequently used to justify the the State’s protection of transnational corporate interests, as demonstrated by the High Court of Ireland’s decision that ISPs must implement the ‘phased disconnection’ method of copyright control (See EMI Records & Ors v. Eircom Ltd., [2010]). The judgement concentrated on the rights of individual creators to ‘keep body and soul together’ by exploiting the ‘fruits of moments of inspiration worked out through weeks of endeavour and representing, sometimes, the distillation of some fundamental experience of life’ (ibid. para. 1). In the internet age these singular geniuses must contend with a medium ‘thickly populated by fraudsters, pornographers of the worst kind and cranks’ (ibid. para. 2). Clearly, the invisible hand of the market cannot control those ‘younger people’ so habituated to downloading that a ‘claim of entitlement seems to have arisen to have what is not theirs for free’ (ibid. para. 3). The libertarian market always requires force to ensure it does not disadvantage the powerful. Yet corporate might coupled with State paternalism has not produced docile acquiescence as the French experience demonstrates.

In May 2009 the French Parliament passed the Création et Internet law requiring ISPs to undertake a ‘graduated response’ or ‘three strikes’ protocol against customers allegedly infringing copyright (Yu 2010).The French version of this protocol first had been seeded in a 2004 report by France's High Council of Literary and Artistic Property, was then ignored when France amended laws in 2006 to comply with an EU directive requiring ‘harmonisation’ of copyright law, and subsequently resurfaced in a 2007 French Ministry of Culture report recommending the establishment of an administrative body to oversee a ‘system of warnings and sanctions’ (Bridy 2011: 52). Hence, Création et Internet had been preceded by a five year period in which the basic idea of ISP involvement in direct punishment of file-sharers had been socialised via policy papers and commissioned research. Under the so-called HADOPIThe law was commonly referred to as HADOPI after the administrative body which would implement it, the High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet. law ISPs were obligated to issue two warnings to such customers, and upon the third alleged infringement the customers' internet accounts would be terminated immediately (Bridy 2011: 52-56). Moreover, the guilty parties would be placed on a national ‘no Internet’ blacklist to prevent them from switching ISPs (Anderson 2009b, np). The law also enabled ISPs to block popular file-sharing sites, and could penalise people for not securing personal internet connections against illicit uses especially via wireless networks. Although other countries including the United States, Italy, and Ireland had discussed similar legislation, France was the first to write it into law (Anderson 2009, np).

Just as file-sharing’s technological battlefields continually shift, the law similarly reflects the fluid nature of the ongoing struggle. HADOPI’s six year passage into legislation had propelled ‘intense online collective action by movements endowed with a high level of knowledge and skills’ in the use of ICTs (Breindl & Briattey 2010: 2). The bill already contravened a 2009 European Parliament decision preventing member states from implementing three-strikes on the basis that ‘disconnecting alleged file-sharers based on evidence from anti-piracy lobby groups restricts the rights and freedoms of Internet users’ (Ernesto 2009, np). Intellectual property activists, free software supporters, and consumer rights groups built an ‘authoritative online source of public information,’ deconstructing legal and technical jargon to communicate the law’s essence through ‘telling metaphors’ (ibid. 11). They explained how the ‘digital guillotine’ would produce dramatic consequences for file-sharers—for those who earned their living from internet-based activities account termination would be death (Yu 2010: 1380).

HADOPI ‘spiralled into legislative hell’ as France’s highest legal authority, the Constitutional Council, ruled that the enforced loss of Internet access was unconstitutional as it violated the ‘fundamental tenets of presumption of innocence’ (Breindl & Briattey 2010: 12). Henceforth HADOPI could warn downloaders but not disconnect their internet accounts. Although HADOPI’s second iteration was passed into law in September 2009, its implementation was a slow, ‘serpentine’ process (ibid. 13). Internet security company Trident Media Guard (TMG) was contracted by content owners to detect infringements using network monitoring software. This software becomes another battle field in which hackers discover vulnerabilities and code ways around them, so yet again a social ordering attempt via technology generates more social disorder. TMG would inform copyright owners of the ‘IP address from which the files in question were available, the ISP of the alleged infringer, and the date and time of the alleged infringement,’ and then the rights owners refer each instance to HADOPI (Yu 2010: 1380). HADOPI could disclose an infringer's identity to the ISP but not to rights owners. The ISP must then issue a warning to the customer within 24 hours. As no minimum volume threshold exists, an infringement covers the exchange of even just one file. If three alleged infringements occur within a year HADOPI organises a prosecutor to bring the matter before a judge who, without undertaking any investigation, can ban a person from the internet for up to twelve months, although people may appeal the decision (Anderson 2009d, np; Bridy 2011: 54-55).

What were the effects of these exceptionally harsh laws? In October 2010 a French music industry body claimed that their members were sending around 25,000 music-related copyright infringements notifications to HADOPI each day (Pichevi 2010, np). However the implementation process was ‘plagued’ with ‘incessant failures’ as Hadopi and ISP computer systems had not been interconnected, and uncertainty existed about who would foot the bill (Breindl & Briattey 2010: 12; 'Hadopi? Not Even Scared!' 2010). In this scenario bureaucratic disaster is imminent: information overload, communication breakdowns, and not enough prosecutors and judges to process cases rapidly Meanwhile file-sharing had increased by 3 per cent since HADOPI, researchers from the University of Rennes in Brittany suggested (Anderson 2010, np). Fifty per cent of 2,000 digital music and video online purchasers admitted to illicit downloading. Ironically, by banning people from using the internet for any purpose HADOPI might ‘eliminate 27 percent of all Internet buyers of music and video’ (ibid.). Small activist groups had sabotaged HADOPI by derailing parliamentary debates, influencing parliamentarians’ votes, catapulting ACTA into the news cycle, and building ‘further suspicion over state-led attempts to enforce “graduated response” procedures’ (Breindl & Briattey 2010: 12-13). Is it a coincidence that to date other national jurisdictions have retreated from the ‘three strikes’ model, with Germany, Spain, Sweden, Hong Kong, and New Zealand rejecting similar laws (ibid. 5).

In Australia the graduated response model has not yet found its sea legs. Firstly, the left-wing Labor government continues to be consumed by two contentious plans for internet regulation and modernisation: internet censorship via a mandatory software filter implemented at ISP level, and the National Broadband Network (NBN) (Bambauer 2008; Gerrand 2010).The proposed Cleanfeed filter has spawned ‘street protests, on-line petitions, opposition from Internet industry groups, and critical press coverage,’ with polls and fora commentary consistently demonstrating the majority of the population (and virtually all geeks) to be against the reviled mechanism (Bambauer 2008: 3; 'All Content Related to Australia' 2011). In contrast, opposition to the NBN is more partisan, coming mainly from supporters of the right-wing Liberal party (Gerrand 2010). Secondly, the government had been awaiting the outcome of a precedent-setting court case centred on file-sharing (Leonard 2010: 272-273). And thirdly, ISPs remained unconvinced about the merits of the model, producing their own detailed critiques (see, for example, iiNet’s Industry Position Paper, 'Hollywood Dreams: a ‘three strikes’ policy put to the question' 2010).

In Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Limited (No. 3) [2010], thirty-four film industry companies represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) had argued that the ISP iiNet ‘by failing to take any steps to stop infringing conduct, authorised the copyright infringement of certain iiNet users.’The applicants in the main were movie industry Leviathans who had chosen Australia (out of many possible countries) as the localised staging ground for a globalised battle. Amongst the 34 plaintiffs taking on the one ISP were Universal City Studios, Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney, Columbia Twentieth Century Fox, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Dreamworks, Sony, and a single Australian free-to-air television company, the Seven Network (Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Limited (No. 3) [2010]). The much-awaited judgement by the Full Court of Australia (upheld by majority on appeal in February 2011), determined that the ISP was not responsible for their customers’ actions (Roadshow Films Pty Limited v iiNet Limited [2011]).The 2011 appeal judgement (paras 122-124) revisited some interesting observations about P2P software dynamics the primary judge had made in the first case. Rejecting the appellant’s ambit claim that each file chunk transmitted within a swarm represented an ‘individual example of an electronic transmission,’ he had observed that the ‘BitTorrent System does not exist outside the aggregate effect of those transmissions,’ and hence the swarm was an ‘entity in itself.’ Therefore acts of electronic transmission occur between the ISP user or peer and the swarm, and not between each individual peer. Moreover, in this context ‘electronically transmit’ did not involve a ‘series of single acts’ but rather the ‘BitTorrent System’ was an ‘ongoing process of communication for as long as one wishes to participate.’ In short, the judge concluded that each user ‘electronically transmits each Film only once’ even if they transmit ‘more than 100 per cent of the Film back to the swarm.’ Had such a precedent been applied to the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case, the damages would have been far less. The unexpected result was a blow to both copyright holders and government. This legal action costing iiNet AUD $6.5 million had not stopped even ‘one customer from downloading in Australia,’ according to its chief executive Michael Malone (Grubb & Moses 2011, np). On 24 March 2011 AFACT announced it was seeking special leave to challenge the decision in the High Court, its last avenue of appeal (Freri 2011). Meanwhile, iiNet reiterated that such legal challenges were pointless, urging content owners instead to work with ISPs to make their material ‘legitimately available’ ('Another court challenge won’t stop illegal downloads: iiNet calls on Hollywood studios to work with industry' 2011).

Previously, in a 96-page report entitled Australia's Digital Economy: Future Directions (2009: 20) the Australian government had signalled it would undertake a major review of those regulatory frameworks ‘most pertinent to the digital economy,’ that is, copyright law and convergence. It queried whether existing ‘safe harbour’ provisions in existing copyright law were adequate enough to ‘deter unauthorised instances of copyright infringement,’ singling out ISP’s ‘key role’ within ‘online activities’ (ibid. 21). On 2 March 2011 the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy released the final Terms of Reference (TOR) for the Convergence Review in which a committee would assess Australia's communications and media legislation (Convergence Review Terms of Reference 2011). It would then advise the government in early 2012 on potential amendments to ensure that the nation’s regulatory framework was appropriate for the new environment in which media and communications technologies converged.Potential policy and legislative changes were framed as being in the best interest of all parties, fostering ‘continued technological change and innovation,’ ensuring ‘protection of Australian content and cultural values,’ reflecting ‘community standards and expectations,’ and safeguarding ‘privacy and other citizens' rights’ (ibid. 2). Furthermore, the TOR stated that the Review Committee ‘may offer views on copyright and the ongoing protection of content in a converged environment, noting that ultimately the Attorney General will determine these matters’ (ibid.). Interestingly, the review’s Background Paper itself does not mention copyright (Convergence Review Background Paper 2011). Subsequently, it is probable that the government will draft three strikes legislation, using recent industry-sponsored reports presenting the standard economic loss arguments to support their case.The Economic consequences of movie piracy – Australia study alleged that thirty percent of Australian adults had ‘participated in movie piracy’ in 2010 (IPSOS MediaCT & Oxford Economics study 2011: 5). The somewhat rubbery projections about revenue and jobs losses based on extrapolating data from 3,500 telephone interviews nevertheless provide more evidence that file-sharing has become a mass phenomenon. The Impact of Internet Piracy on the Australian Economy is even more contested research. Commissioned by the Australian Content Industry Group it transposed findings of an already controversial European report onto the Australian digital landscape with little regard for local data or the complexities of digital culture (Ferrer 2011). Predictions such as over 48,000 jobs to be lost by 2016 in the content industries sector along with $5.21 billion lost sales as a result of file-sharing are not substantiated credibly (ibid. 10). When a mainstream weekend newspaper featured the summarised report, reader responses were mostly negative (McMahon, N. 2011).

In anticipation of the global battle opening up its next front on the Australian legislative territory, on 15 March 2011 iiNet released the discussion paper ‘Encouraging legitimate use of Online Content: an iiNet view’ (2011). Central within its schema is the ‘impartial referee’ who will resolve disputes between content owners and consumers, and issue penalties to ‘offenders’ (ibid. 8).Responding to forum queries from the P2P community about funding of the proposed independent body, iiNet Founder and Managing Director Michael Malone suggested it could be funded by fines imposed on file-sharing offenders, a position many disagreed with ('iiNet Framework For Content Provision' 2011, np). Key reasons why Australians download were summarised by iiNet’s Matthew Jones: ‘“staggered” worldwide releases, regional coding and paying $89.95 AUD for a digitally delivered video game when [it] sells in the USA...for $49.95 USD.’ (ibid.). Furthermore, forum participant Matt11 noted that ‘Amazon do not sell MP3s in Australia’ and ‘many video games are not released here forcing people to resort to unauthorized mod chips/hacks just to play (imported) legally purchased software etc. The list goes on. This kind of thing makes people resentful which ultimately leads to more piracy (ibid.). Such comments suggest that reasons for file-sharing might be more spatialised than generally assumed, and hence Big Content’s strategies to curtail or manage the phenomenon might also need to be localised. This runs contrary to the totalising approach of the supranational treaties. ISPs will provide identifying details of their customers only to this independent body, who in turn provides the customer in the first instance with ‘educative information,’ and later with escalating penalties including demerit points, scaled fines, notices to attend court appearances, and possibly ‘shaping of peer to peer traffic’ (ibid. 9,11). Significantly, the onus is on the ‘Content Owner’ to undertake their own ‘detective work’ and provide ‘cogent and unequivocal evidence’ of infringement (ibid. 9). Thus all internet users are accorded the presumption of innocence. And if they are found guilty, then, as iiNet’s Chief Regulatory Officer Steve Dalby commented on a Whirlpool technology forum, ‘A fine turns up in the mail. No lawyers, no court, no long winded, two year process with lots of hearings and appeals’ ('iiNet vs AFACT Federal court judgement - part 2' 2011). Yet regardless of its merits in comparison with harsher three strikes protocols elsewhere, this model ignores the imminent administrative problems if the arbitrator received anything like the 25,000 notices a day HADOPI generates. Perhaps the more rational the solution, the greater the potential is for mounting chaos. Possibly the ISP industry cares little for the logistics, as long as the responsibility to make it work rests with the arbitrator, and Big Content and government pick up the tab.

The iiNet court cases also revealed the scope of the ‘sophisticated information’ content owners could now collect via network monitoring software (ibid.). Prior to commencing legal action AFACT failed to make all their information ‘available to iiNet (or anyone else),’ but now the law has determined what is required for the future. As Dalby warned, if content owners ‘want to go after infringers’ they have enough evidence ‘to nail them, according to the courts’ (ibid.). Defending iiNet’s model he asked, ‘So – do you want to be chased by someone that doesn't mind overkill (and makes movies about it), or would you rather have an independent body that has community standards to meet?’

As the legislative apparatus becomes less ambiguous in Australia and jurisdictions around the world, cloaking systems that mask IP addresses such as TOR will likely become more widely used. And so new cycles of ordering/disordering regimes continue throughout the interconnecting layers of informational capitalism.

Writer's Note
This is another section of a longer text I am working on.

Bibliography

'All Content Related to Australia' 2011, OpenNet Initiative, http://opennet.net/countries/australia
'Encouraging legitimate use of Online Content: an iiNet view' 2011, http://www.iinet.net.au/press/releases/201103-encouraging-legitimate.pdf
Anderson, N. 2010, 'Piracy up in France after tough three-strikes law passed', Ars Technica, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/piracy-up-in-france-afte...
'Another court challenge won’t stop illegal downloads: iiNet calls on Hollywood studios to work with industry' 2011, http://www.iinet.net.au/press/releases/110324-court-challenge-wont-stop-...
Australia's Digital Economy: Future Directions 2009, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Canberra, http://www.dbcde.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/11768/DIGITAL_ECONOM...
Bambauer, D.E. 2008, 'Filtering in Oz: Australia's Foray into Internet Censorship', Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 125.
Breindl, Y. & Briattey, F. 2010, 'Digital Network Repertoires and the Contentious Politics of Digital Copyright in France and the European Union', paper presented to the Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: An Impact Assessment, Oxford Internet Institute, 16-17 September 2010.
Bridy, A. 2010, 'ACTA and the Specter of Graduated Response', American University International Law Review.
Bridy, A. 2011, 'Is Online Copyright Enforcement Scalable?', Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Forthcoming.
Convergence Review Background Paper 2011, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Canberra, http://www.dbcde.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/131665/Convergence_R...
Convergence Review Terms of Reference 2011, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Canberra, http://www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/convergence_review/convergence_r...
EMI Records & Ors v. Eircom Ltd., [2010] IEHC 108 (16 April 2010) http://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IEHC/2010/H108.html
EMI Records (Ireland) Ltd & Ors v. Eircom Ltd & Anor, [2005] IEHC 233 (8 July 2005) http://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IEHC/2005/H233.html
Ferrer, E. 2011, The Impact of Internet Piracy on the Australian Economy, Sphere Analysis.
Freri, M. 2011, iiNever-ending story: AFACT to appeal, Delimiter, http://delimiter.com.au/2011/03/24/iinever-ending-story-afact-to-appeal/
Gerrand, P. 2010, 'The National Broadband Network: The defining issue in Australian politics in 2010', Telecommunications Journal of Australia, vol. 60, no. 4, p. 52.51 to 52.54.
Grubb, B. & Moses, A. 2011, 'iiNet again slays Hollywood in landmark piracy case', Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 2011, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/iinet-again-slays-holly...
'Hadopi? Not Even Scared!' 2010, La Quadrature du Net, http://www.laquadrature.net/en/hadopi-not-even-scared
'Hollywood Dreams: a ‘three strikes’ policy put to the question' 2010, http://www.iinet.net.au/press/releases/20100422-hollywood-dreams.pdf
'iiNet Framework For Content Provision' 2011, Whirlpool, http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1659682
'iiNet vs AFACT Federal court judgment - part 2' 2011, Whirlpool, http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1378383
IPSOS MediaCT & Oxford Economics 2011, Economic consequences of movie piracy - Australia, Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), Oxford.
Leonard, P. 2010, 'Building Safe Harbours in Choppy Waters: towards a sensible approach to liability of internet intermediaries in Australia', paper presented to the Communications Policy and Research Forum, Sydney, 15–16 November 2010.
McMahon, N. 2011, 'Nation of unrepentant pirates costs $900m', Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 2011, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/nation-of-unrepentant-p...
Roadshow Films Pty Limited v iiNet Limited [2011] FCAFC 23 2011 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/2011/23.html
Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Limited (No. 3) [2010] FCA 24 2010 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2010/24.html
Toner, A. 2011, Ireland: Three Strikes and Fair Use, kNOw Future Inc., http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/ireland-three-strikes-and-fai...
Yu, P.K. 2010, 'The Graduated Response', Florida Law Review, Vol. 62, pp. 1373-1430, 2010.

Escaping the Digital Enclosures 1: Networked Battlegrounds produced by the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

doll_yoko — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:44:24 +0000

File-sharing has continued to expand over the past decade regardless of some landmark legal wins against peer-to-peer companies, torrent aggregator websites, and individual file-sharers. Whenever popular torrent indexing sites like SuprNova and Mininova have been legally forced to remove copyright-infringing materials and/or monetise exchanges by charging users for access to copyrighted materials and passing on royalties, alternative sites have sprung up almost immediately.Site cloning is easy on a technical level (Wolchok & Halderman 2010), although community-building is a lengthier, less predictable process. As major copyright owners increased their surveillance of torrent sites, in 2001 the ‘BitTorrent community’ responded with technological measure by deploying ‘decentralising tracking systems based on distributed hash tables (DHTs)’ (ibid. 1). However, each party in the ‘BitTorrent arms race’ could exploit this trend by using new techniques for ‘rapidly crawling’ the DHTs. Computer scientists Wolchok and Halderman (ibid.) built a BitTorrent search engine indexing over one million torrents in a couple of hours using just one computer, proving that DHT crawling could rapidly ‘bootstrap’ torrent discovery sites to enable new sites to be created ‘almost immediately’ when existing ones were shut down. However, their experiments also demonstrated that it is possible to ‘monitor BitTorrent user activity by crawling only the DHTs and not the centralised tracker infrastructure or torrent discovery sites’ (ibid.). Thus over 16 days of monitoring they observed ‘1.5 million torrents downloaded by 7.9 million IP addresses; which effectively enabled them to measure ‘what content each user is sharing,’ a clear boon to content owners ready for litigation of individual file-sharers. Infinitely reproducible media forms circulate via interlinked electronic clusters and scalable global networks. Those who have legally acquired cultural artefacts insist that they possess the right to digitise and circulate them over the internet, just as books and pamphlets have circulated informally since the advent of another world-changing technology, the printing press. The social intention remains the same, the sharing of ideas and cultural expressions. Enthusiasts share their passions for popular culture and/or obscure specialist media by participating in online discussion fora on their favourite torrent sites. Circulation encompasses not only content, but also ideas and information about that content and its makers, more evidence that file-sharing networks extend beyond the technological to the social domain.

In 2008, faced with escalating battles on multiple jurisdictional and industry sector front lines, Big Content shifted gear by proposing a three-pronged global strategy requiring tight cooperation between sovereign governments and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (Yu 2010: 1374; Bridy 2011: 44). Firstly, transglobal corporations through their professional organisations insisted that ISPs around the world monitor their customers' downloading behaviours and discipline copyright infringements. Secondly, they lobbied national governments to enforce such ISP co-operation by introducing legislation which preferenced (often transnational or multinational) corporate interests over citizens. The new ‘graduated response’ or ‘three strikes’ protocols gathered steam, with governments within Britain, Europe, Canada, and across Asia drawing up relatively similar laws to present to their parliaments (Bridy 2011: 44). Finally and most significantly, they pushed for a plurilateral treaty—the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which would ensure compliance with above demands by harmonising copyright laws including those related to file-sharing.

US industry groups have thus far refrained from pushing their own government to adopt a ‘statutorily mandated’ system, opting instead to pursue ‘voluntary agreements’ with ISPs (Bridy 2010: 45).Perhaps this reluctance is due to entrenched libertarian values, as US-owned entertainment companies have vigorously lobbied other countries to legislate for mandatory graduated response systems. See Footnote 3. This is of particular import given the Wikileaks’ Cablegate revelation that in 2008 the US government had demanded that the Spanish government must ‘curb file-sharing’ by instituting an ‘extra-judicial process to shut down websites’ or else they would be placed on the US ‘annual “Special 301” intellectual property watch list’ (Anderson 2010; Hinze 2010).On 3 December 2008 major daily Spanish newspaper El Pais published the 20 point ‘sensitive but unclassified’ cable from the US Embassy in Spain to Washington. Point 2 of the cable cut to the chase:
We propose to tell the new government that Spain will appear on the Watch List if it does not do three things by October 2008. First, issue a [Government of Spain] announcement stating that internet piracy is illegal, and that the copyright levy system does not compensate creators for copyrighted material acquired through peer-to-peer file sharing. Second, amend the 2006 “circular” that is widely interpreted in Spain as saying that peer-to-peer file sharing is legal. Third, announce that the GoS will adopt measures along the lines of the French and/or UK proposals aimed at curbing Internet piracy by the summer of 2009.
As Spain ignored these demands, the US put Spain on its watch list, where as of 2010 it is sandwiched between Romania and Tajikistan (Kirk 2010). See also the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) chronology of events by Hinze (2010). Wikileaks was instrumental in bringing the US government’s role to public attention in Spain according to the EFF, triggering a (successful) public campaign against a proposed government act which would have acquiesced to US demands. Such political interference demonstrates how the US entertainment industry works with the US government to ‘bully governments to create harmonised laws that continuously ratchet up copyright protection, one country at a time,’ asserts Gwen Hinze (ibid.) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). A cursory summary of the ACTA negotiations and machinations provides evidence that global networks of activists, scholars, and file-leakers have influenced the course of events in the asymmetrical battle for control of digital content.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been described by legal scholar Margot Kaminski (2011: 2) as an ‘attempt to introduce maximalist intellectual property standards in the international sphere,’ and ‘primarily a copyright treaty, masquerading as a treaty that addresses dangerous medicines and defective imports.’ As such, it has had the realm of file-sharing clearly in its sights. ACTA represents the apex of coordinated international lobbying since plans for the treaty were officially announced in October 2007 (after some years of informal discussions suggests key ACTA researcher Michael Geist) (2009b, np). This treaty involving 38 countries has been negotiated through a ‘private network of, by and for invited corporate insiders’ operating outside of ‘conventional’ policy-making venues such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), notes activist and author David Bollier (2009, np). The lengthy in-camera deliberations have avoided public scrutiny by denying Freedom of Information requests by special interest groups and interested scholars (Geist 2009a, np).Given the United States’ role in driving ACTA , when the Obama Administration was installed in 2008 some observers anticipated that the treaty’s secrecy provisions would be relaxed. But instead the US government determined that the draft text was a ‘matter of national security,’ withholding even the negotiators' names from FOI requests ‘while sharing the negotiating text secretly with hundreds of industry lobbyists’ (Love 2010, np). A major concern is that this secretive process enables ‘policy laundering,’ that is, the use of ‘Trojan horse’ international treaties to justify ‘controversial legislation within one’s own country,’ smuggling in ‘more expansive substantive rights’ disguised as ‘better-coordinated enforcement’ (Public Knowledge, quoted in Bollier; Bridy 2010: 7). Such non-transparency masks the all-encompassing, minutely-detailed agendas of a networked elite class as it did with other comparable agreements (MAI, TRIPS, GATT, NAFTA). In this case treaty signatories represent the interests of those at the pinnacle of the convergent media, entertainment, and telecommunications industries, and thus can ride roughshod over the desires of millions who have made their own circuits of production and exchange.

Ordering attempts inevitably produce disordering functions, which generate their own socially productive momentum, and so the cycle continues. Over time negotiations details and actual draft documents leaked out from the ACTA info-bunkers, following the cyber-libertarian principle that ‘information wants to be free.’ Leaks increased the pressure on governments to open up the process, and more recent leaks in February 2011 from the Wikileaks Cablegate tranche of documents have revealed how heavily the US government was pressuring certain signatories to unequivocally outlaw and punish file-sharing.Wikileaks gave internet freedom advocacy organisation La Quadrature du Net exclusive access to ACTA cables revealing the Unites States’ ‘prime role’ in the negotiations. See 'WikiLeaks Cables Shine Light on ACTA History' (2011) for a brief analysis and links to raw cables from embassies in Tokyo, Mexico, Rome, Stockholm and Lisbon.

What little was known about ACTA came from a compilation of Discussion Memos entitled 'Japan – US Joint Proposal' and marked US Confidential (to be declassified in 2018) which had been posted on Wikileaks in April 2009 (Anderson (2009). The leaked material contained various drafts of the proposal in 2008 (dated May 8, 25 June, 7 July, 23 September, and 16 October).Although unable to relocate this specific document at the post-Cablegate Wikileaks mirror sites (or anywhere else), I had previously downloaded and saved it. A notice on a Wikileaks mirror page has all links to the document broken. Clear copies of some drafts within this compilation are now linked from the Leaked Documents page on the ACTA Watch website of Michael Geist (2011). Its physicality is intriguing, a poorly copied artefact bearing the signs of stealthy work by a mole, photographing the document page by page. as it rested on someone’s lap (perhaps even during an ACTA meeting). Some other leaked documents by anonymous whistle-blowers appear to have been liberated in a less harried way. Cultural activists, privacy campaigners, legal experts, and interested others have used these raw materials to raise serious concerns about the treaty’s intentions and substance.Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa (2010a np, 2011), has played a leading role in analysing such leaked content particularly as it applies to Canada, maintaining an online repository of key documents, as has James Love through the auspices of Knowledge Ecology International (see 'The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)' 2011). While a number of legal activists from organisations such as Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) have weighed in on the ACTA debate, law professor Annemarie Bridy's (2010) comparative analysis of leaked documents stands out for both its thoroughness and non-partisan approach. The negotiating texts concretise the anonymous negotiators’ intentions, revealing which parties will benefit from the treaty's provisions and which will be disempowered. Moreover, subtle linguistic shifts in the various iterations reveal the subtext of the tensions amongst the negotiating parties themselves, producing disorder within the ranks of the ordering project itself, as both Bridy's (2010: 7-11) and Kaminski’s (2011: 26-44 ) analyses demonstrate.Through its various iterations, the draft ACTA treaty centred on internationally-cooperative mechanisms to enforce Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) covering copyright, trademarks, and patents ('KEI's ACTA timeline' 2011). While organised counterfeiting operations were one target, its definition of ‘pirated copyright goods’ encompasses material circulated via file-sharing (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement 2010: 4). When a near-final draft was publicly released, some earlier provisions including the mandating the implementation of harsh punitive regimes against individual file-sharers had been omitted ('ACTA Consolidated Text, Informal Predecisional/Deliberative Draft, 2 October 2010'). This ‘ACTA Ultra-Lite’ treaty revealed just how much ground the United States had given away in regards to its internet provisions (Geist 2010b np). Provisions relating specifically to ISPs created no new substantive obligations on them to yield to rights owners demands. Pressure from inside and outside the formal process that the treaty be ‘more protective of the parties' sovereign prerogatives in areas relating to substantive rights, liabilities, and exceptions’ had caused this apparent retreat (Bridy 2010: 8). Nevertheless ‘graduated response’ measures remained ‘tacitly endorsed’ by both the preamble and provisions promoting ‘greater cooperation between rights owners and service providers’ (ibid. 1).

In March 2010 the European Parliament voted 633 to 13 to force the disclosure of the negotiating text, forcing a ‘one time release’ of the ACTA negotiating text on 16 April 2010 (Love 2010, np; see also Yu 2010: 1377-8). Subsequently only the United States has blocked additional releases of the draft treaty. In contrast European representatives had recognised that secrecy had exposed the negotiations to attacks from numerous quarters, disorder within the info-realm generating its own transglobal constituency sharing information, ideas, strategies, and resources. In a November 2010 Resolution the European Parliament noted that the ‘public criticism of the secrecy of the negotiations’ clearly signalled the ‘political unsustainability’ of closed processes, and recommended that the ACTA Committee ‘operate in an open, inclusive and transparent manner’ (Rinaldi et al 2000, np).

When the final, legally-verified version of ACTA (dated 3 December 2010) was released publicly, governments expediently adopted a position of soliciting feedback, pledging for example that a ‘decision on signing any final new ACTA treaty will only be taken after full public and parliamentary scrutiny (Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2011). Until all parties ratify ACTA, a global network of opponents continue to pool their resources to raise public awareness and lobby governments about striking a balance between individual rights and corporate interests in the digital domain. To date this network is composed primarily of legal and media scholars, and internet rights groups, with grass roots file-sharers on dedicated P2P fora such as TorrentFreak remaining relatively silent on the subject (although ACTA news posted on the geek news site Slashdot attracts numerous comments). Possibly this disconnect happens because such P2P fora tend to focus on events visibly related to P2P such as lawsuits against The Pirate Bay, other facilitating entities, and individuals. ACTA’s clandestine negotiations centre on establishing a meta-level of control. Perhaps because file-sharers already flaunt existing laws with impunity the threat of this invisible power is of little interest to them. Fora commentary demonstrates a commonly-shared conviction that P2P culture always will find a way to circumvent new restrictions, whether legal or technological.

The ‘most worrying provisions’ of ACTA’s final draft included now ‘subtler’ ‘legal and monetary pressure’ forcing ISPs to ‘police their networks and users themselves,’ noted La Quadrature du Net ('ACTA: Updated Analysis of the Final Version' 2010, np). This ‘weapon’ benefiting the entertainment industries was ‘incompatible with democratic imperatives and...fundamental freedoms’ (ibid.). For example, Article 23.46 set out criminal sanctions for ‘aiding and abetting’ which could be ‘used against Internet technical intermediaries and technology providers as a way to force them into accepting “cooperation” with rightsholders’ (ibid.). Furthermore, Article 27 covering Enforcement in the Digital Environment specifically identified ‘infringement of copyright or related rights over digital networks, which may include the unlawful use of means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes,’ a provision that La Quadrature du Net envisaged could indirectly criminalise ‘blogging platforms, P2P networks, free software, and other technologies that contribute to dissemination of culture and knowledge on the Internet.’ Finally, a non-binding paragraph allowed ‘rights-holders to obtain private data regarding the users of Internet service providers, without a decision of a judge,’ raising further concerns about due process and electronic privacy issues.The text of this non-binding provision below is interesting, as it accords all rights to the content owners and the State, and none to ISPs nor internet users (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement 2010: 16).
[Article 27, Paragraph 4] A Party may provide, in accordance with its laws and regulations, its competent authorities with the authority to order an online service provider to disclose expeditiously to a right holder information sufficient to identify a subscriber whose account was allegedly used for infringement, where that right holder has filed a legally sufficient claim of trademark or copyright or related rights infringement, and where such information is being sought for the purpose of protecting or enforcing those rights. These procedures shall be implemented in a manner that avoids the creation of barriers to legitimate activity, including electronic commerce, and, consistent with that Party’s law, preserves fundamental principles such as freedom of expression, fair process, and privacy.

Inevitably, the unabated resistance to ACTA from below has propelled Big Content to formulate new proposals for reigning in file-sharing and other unauthorised forms of circulation. The most recent project is the multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the ‘son of ACTA’ which would export core features of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act to a diverse agglomeration of countries including Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam (Anderson 2011). Described by Michael Geist (cited in ibid.) ‘everything [the US] wanted in ACTA but didn't get,’ it is being drafted in secret but as with ACTA the boat has holes.

Over time online nodes in the resistance circuits develop distinct cultures and expanded networks around them, expanding potential leaked document depositories from where revelations ripple outwards to countless technology news and mainstream media sites. For example, someone deliberately chose Knowledge Ecology International as the drop box for the first leak of TPP material, perhaps because this new treaty combines the interests of both Big Content and Big Pharma (see 'Trans-Pacific Partnership, Intellectual Property Rights Chapter, Draft – February 10, 2011' 2011). In particular Article 16: Special Measures Relating to Enforcement in the Digital Environment devotes 4 pages dedicated to the proposed obligations of ‘service providers’ in monitoring and punishing copyright infringers (ibid. 32-36). Within hours a synopsis posted on Slashdot had attracted around 300 comments (''Son of ACTA' Worse Than Original' 2011). And with Wikileaks becoming more unstable and problematic (for both technical and social reasons), alternative safe havens for hot data will come into being. GlobaLeaks (2010, emphasis added) is one such example, launched by a geographically-dispersed group of hacktivists working on an open source ‘worldwide, anonymous, censorship-resistant, distributed Leak Amplification Network supporting whistleblowers all around the world.’

Bibliography

'ACTA: Updated Analysis of the Final Version' 2010, La Quadrature du Net, viewed 15 March 2011, http://www.laquadrature.net/en/acta-updated-analysis-of-the-final-version
Anderson, N. 2009, 'Canada, US pledge "transparency" on ACTA', Ars Technica, viewed 15 February 2011, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/canada-us-pledge-transpa....
Anderson, N. 2010, 'How Wikileaks killed Spain's anti-P2P law', Ars Technica, viewed 19 February 2011, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/how-wikileaks-killed-spa....
Anderson, N. 2011, 'Son of ACTA: meet the next secret copyright treaty', Ars Technica, viewed 15 February 2011, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/son-of-acta-meet-the-nex...
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement 2010, no 3 December 2010, Canberra, viewed 15 March 2011, http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/acta/Final-ACTA-text-following-legal-verifi...
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2011, 'Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)', Commonwealth of Australia, viewed 20 March 2011
Bollier, D. 2009, Et tu, Obama? Open Government Suffers Another Blow, On the Commons, viewed 20January 2011 .
Bridy, A. 2010, 'ACTA and the Specter of Graduated Response', American University International Law Review.
Bridy, A. 2011, 'Is Online Copyright Enforcement Scalable?', Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Forthcoming.
Geist, M. 2009a, Putting Together the ACTA Puzzle: Privacy, P2P Major Targets, viewed 20 January 2011, http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3660/125.
Geist, M. 2009b, The ACTA Timeline (or Everything You Need To Know About ACTA But Your Government Won't Tell You), viewed 15 March 2011, http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3786/125
Geist, M. 2010a, ACTA Guide, Part Two: The Documents (Official and Leaked), viewed 20 January 2011, http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4730/125
Geist, M. 2011, ACTA Watch, viewed 15 March 2011, http://www.actawatch.org
'Globaleaks' 2010, viewed 15 March 2011, http://www.globaleaks.org
Hinze, G. 2010, Not-So-Gentle Persuasion: US Bullies Spain into Proposed Website Blocking Law 17 December 2010 edn, Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/not-so-gentle-persuasion-us-bullies...
Kaminski, M. 2011, 'An Overview and the Evolution of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.', PIJIP Research Paper no. 19., http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/research/17
'KEI's ACTA timeline' 2011, KEI's ACTA timeline, Knowledge Ecology International, viewed 22 January 2011,
Kirk, R. 2010, 2010 Special 301 Report, Office of the United States Trade Representative, Washington.
Love, J. 2010, 'White House Blocks Disclosure of Secret Intellectual Property Trade', The Huffington Post, viewed 20 January 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/white-house-blocks-disclo_b_704...
''Son of ACTA' Worse Than Original' 2011, Slashdot, viewed 16 March 2011, http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/11/2134224/Son-of-ACTA-Worse-Than-Or...
Rinaldi, N., Schaake, M., Alvaro, A., De Sarnez, M. & Weber, R. 2010, Motion for a Resolution on ACTA – preparing for the consent procedure, European Parliament, viewed 20 January 2011, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION&reference=B7-2...
'The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)' 2011, The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Knowledge Ecology International, viewed 21 January 2011, http://keionline.org/acta
'Trans-Pacific Partnership, Intellectual Property Rights Chapter, Draft – February 10, 2011' 2011, viewed 15 March 2011, http://keionline.org/sites/default/files/tpp-10feb2011-us-text-ipr-chapt...
'WikiLeaks Cables Shine Light on ACTA History' 2011, La Quadrature du Net, viewed 15 March 2011, http://www.laquadrature.net/en/wikileaks-cables-shine-light-on-acta-history
Wolchok, S. & Halderman, J.A. 2010, 'Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for fun and profit', paper presented to the 4th USENIX Conference on Offensive Technologies, Washington, DC.
Yu, P.K. 2010, 'The Graduated Response', Florida Law Review, Vol. 62, pp. 1373-1430, 2010.

Image Credit
OperationPaperStorm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkanonymous/5288107092

Writer's Note
This is a section of a chapter (revised abstract attached) I am writing for a special issue of the Journal Global Networks entitled ‘Networks of Disorder.’ Editors: Jonathan Marshall and James Goodman. Forthcoming in 2012.

SUCKA my code, baby: Peer-to-Peer's production of sprawling unkempt cultural knowledge archives

doll_yoko — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 01:26:16 +0000

Introduction

Within the internet's relatively short lifespan, specific software applications, technical protocols,and hardware advances have fed its evolution as a communicative, social environment. Each advance contains within itself the distinguishing features of informational capitalism (in the sense that it is a new productive and social paradigm, much as industrial capitalism was before it), and also reproduces and expands informational capitalism. Such expansion however is significantly differentiated along spatial and political lines; the topography of globalisation is irregular, bumpy not smooth. Within this, technology is neither ideologically neutral nor somehow external to the societies from which it emanates; rather it is deeply embedded within the social, forming a “techno-social” field. As the entire world becomes increasingly globalised, that is, comprised of sets of deeply integrated and highly networked interdependencies, especially those of an economic and legal nature (leaving aside the environmental for now), currents of social change also move globally (as they always have) and speedily, riding on the waves of the techno-social. Surf's up, and there's no going back!

Since the beginning of internet time so-called “killer applications” built upon commonly-agreed communications protocols have opened up creative and productive possibilities for users.Internet applications provide a means and an inspiration for people sharing common interests and passions to aggregate ideas and resources in rich communicative environments. Many such applications emanate from the grassroots of computing and hacking cultures, that is, individuals and autonomous communities solving problems and building solutions to needs they themselves have identified. However, this is not to underplay the role that educational and scientific institutions, and to a lesser extent corporations, have had in developing applications and providing (often free) server space. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s countless special interest groups gathered together via the USENET network (ref). Text-based Multi-User Domains (MUDs) and Multi-User Domains Object-Oriented (MOOs) offered the first popular incarnation of internet-located role-playing games and collective experiments in playful improvisation with avatars. And early portals such as the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) operated as attractors of like-minded people in search of intellectual companionship and community. Email in general was perhaps the first killer app, at least for a relatively homogeneous academic and scientific community who were already familiar with the use of (initially mainframe time-share) computing systems. The emergence of text-based threaded discussion lists on a myriad of topics as exemplified by Usenet played a significant role in the geo-spatial and cultural diversification of the internet. Some Silicon Valley corporations such as Xerox Parc invested in pure research and development projects focussed on how people might interact and create together online, developing new Object-Oriented programming languages which supported real-time role-playing within stripped-down Command Line Interface (CLI) environments such as LambdaMOO. Later, the Mosaic and Netscape web browsers built upon HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), a networking protocol enabling people to make and share distributed, collaborative, hypermedia via an easy to use graphical interface—the World Wide Web (WWW). It was not long before the advertising industry (led by Manhattan's DoubleClick), developers of secure forms of online electronic payment, and entrepreneurial companies with goods and services to sell, entered the picture, partially transforming the “information super highway” (which was always a reductive representation of net use) into a vast electronic mall.

Lest people drift away from an increasingly commercialised and regulated internet environment, software facilitating the production of web-based personal journals (blogs) heralded the rebirth of the 1990s home page. This time it was a younger and typographically cooler demographic leading the way in net narcissism, building a perfect market for the next techno-social wave, social networking, as exemplified by platforms such as MySpace and particularly FaceBook. Social networking sites took the genius of Tim Berners-Lee's hyperlink (invented to expand possibilities for meaningful communication) and transformed it into excess, an excess of ego-driven interconnections and personal data for capture by a global marketplace in which such data is a primary resource.

The phenomenon of peer-to-peer file-sharing over the internet, or P2P, first emerged in the mid-1990s, around the middle of this geological period. In this chapter I argue that an examination of some salient features of P2P, including historical, technological and social aspects, reveal it to be emblematic of how global networks function within a globalised info-capitalism, both as regimes of ordering and disordering. Both ordering and disordering tendencies within the techno-social fields with which P2P engages are productive of the new, both technological and social. The mass uptake of P2P despite legal and other barriers, and the social relations which file-sharing encourages, particularly the practice of sharing amongst strangers within loosely-constituted, unstable networks, might signify a new form of social reproduction directly born from the network form. Is the network an example of semi-organic parthenogenesis? Using documentary material in the public realm including media reports, academic research, file-sharing fora, and leaked intergovernmental treaty documents, I ground this theoretical proposition within a multi-perspectival historical framework. I focus primarily upon interconnected transglobal networks across three fields of practice: the field of file-sharing seeking complete network freedom (programmers and users); the field of corporate and government elites seeking network monitoring and regulation; and field of academic, legal, and media circulating and analysing developments in the first two fields.

The Internet's Field of Dreams

From the outset, the internet was designed as a decentralised and undisciplined mechanism for communications and information exchange, a “network of networks, or an internetwork” (Terranova 2004: 41, emphasis in original). Its evolution has relied on “access to common code” and ICT resources, and the ability to engage with others in “unrestricted networks” (Hardt & Negri 2009: x). North American Cold War concerns had propelled early research on a distributed computer network, yet ARPANET, the internet's predecessor, was developed within, and culturally influenced by, the sphere of academia, and hence energised by the “political dreams” of 1960s “American counter-culture” (Pasquinelli 2010: 288). These visions varied according to the dreamers, from Black Power activists to Flower Power antiwar hippies, but a thread of autonomy and rejection of capital's status quo intertwined these dreams.

Launched in 1969 ARPANET was a promiscuous network which enabled different types of computers and operating systems to communicate with each other via common open technical standards and protocols. Computer scientists/hackers addressed the challenge of materially and culturally different hardware systems by developing common codes via which they could communicate, a kind of Esperanto for machines which could handle the polyglottal chaos, making love not war. In January 1983 the contemporary internet came into being, heterogeneous small computers communicating using the TCP/IP protocol (Gillies and Cailliau 2000). The civilian part of this network, ARPA Internet, flourished, and had produced three million hosts (nodes) by the time it was decommissioned in early 1990. By 1996 the new environment now simply known as the internet supported some thirteen million hosts. Similarly, the development of the World Wide Web (WWW), the hypertextual, graphical platform which popularised and globalised internet usage developed by Tim Berners-Lee at Conseil Européen pur la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) in the early 1990s, was motivated by the problem of how researchers could use the internet to easily share knowledge encapsulated in different formats (Gillies & Cailliau 2000). As both the internet and the WWW had been produced by inhabitants of the “academic gift economy” it was assumed that research outcomes would be shared for the social good (Barbrook 2005, no page numbers). This attitude has been embedded within the technological and social structures of the globally networked electronic domain since its inception.

Although the techno-social assemblages that constitute file-sharing have arisen not from comparable collective practices within the academic heartlands but rather from the singular obsessions of (mainly) young educated men, a similar techno-libertarian cultural imperative that “information just wants to be free” has shaped these projects (endnote 1 – source). To follow this imperative is to embrace disorder at a fundamental level, to harness chaos as a means of producing energies, desires, labour, and material across loosely-arranged, globally-emergent networks. It was not always this way, but the earliest projects, particularly as exemplified by Napster, suffered and eventually failed because of a reliance on centralised models of organisation and exchange. Order was thus Thanatos, and once it imploded due to the inherent vulnerabilities order generates, the unquenchable Eros could really let loose.

File-sharing in general, with its new forms of gifted labour and autonomous circuits of exchange, threatens the established order of information capitalism. Despite the gloss of the digital new, info-capitalism continues to be partially based on hierarchical models of production, circulation, control and power, as even a brief evolutionary sketch reveals.

From Pyramids To Networks and Back Again: Taylorism, Fordism, post-Fordism and beyond

Driven by industrial engineer Frederick Taylor, the Industrial Revolution's early 20th century iteration had seeded a “scientific model” of production to enhance business efficiency and profitability (Marazzi 2008: 50). Taylor's monograph, The Principles of Scientific Management, advised dividing all tasks into precise steps which could be monitored; his recommendations widely adopted created a paradigmatic shift in the organisation of labour. The consequences of Taylorism's division of labour and task fragmentation was to further deskill and alienate workers. Fordism built upon these foundations with its centralised factory model spatially concentrating workers clocking on to perform coordinated, repetitive tasks on semi-mechanised assembly lines, space, time, and actions all externally regimented. The mass commodities produced were subsequently bought by the workers whose accord-guaranteed relatively high wages until the 1970s had generated a hitherto unknown consumer class, with appetites fed by the burgeoning advertising field. Together Taylorism's micro-control of the “immediate productive processes” and Fordism's “regulation of the social cycle of reproduction” transformed capitalist production, complemented by the Keynesian welfare state's macroeconomic societal control mechanisms (Hardt & Negri 2000: 267).

When a cluster of geopolitical and social forces triggered a globally-wide but spatially-differentiated economic collapse in the 1970s, another socio-technological transformation occurred, similarly producing a major new paradigm of social organisation. The shift from industrialisation to post-industrialisation or “informatisation” of the services sector flowed through to secondary production (mirroring agriculture's earlier transition to semi-industrialisation), with “informationalised industrial processes” the apex of contemporary manufacturing (Hardt 1999: 90, 93). Japanese automobile maker Toyota forged the path of informatised industrial production by incorporating informatics advances into the heart of manufacturing processes. Toyotaism's Just-In-Time method pulled market information into the factory, enabling the rapid retooling of assembly lines; team work was integral to the production process, with factories divided into semi-autonomous groups of workers cooperating to produce whole products. Perhaps for the first time since industrialisation communication entered “directly into the productive process,” with the chain of production becoming a “linguistic chain” (Marazzi 2008: 49).

Here lies the advent of post-Fordism, the paradigmatic form of contemporary production, with its focus on communication and the increasing commodification and informatisation of all aspects of life, including the affective and the social. The network is post-Fordism's characteristic organisational form, replacing the Taylorist/Fordist pyramid of control. Labour is increasingly autonomous (that is, self-employed and/or self-organising), and “communicative-relational” (Marazzi 2008: 49).The governing social power over spatially and culturally disaggregated labour has partially dematerialised, becoming translucent. We are now conditioned to be our own oppressors. Likewise responsibility and accountability, perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the pass-the-parcel buck-passing by key protagonists in the Global Financial Crisis (2009 and arguably ongoing), does a good impersonation of The Invisible Man, minus the bandages and sunglasses. The post-Fordist paradigm replicates the earlier dominance of Taylorism, Fordism, and Toyotaism, and rather than superseding these models it incorporates their most useful features. For example, in the Taylorised call centre workers' communication adheres to rigid scripts and is monitored for 'quality and training purposes'.

Unlike previous historical tendencies of organisation, post-Fordism extends beyond traditional sites of production (school, field, factory, office) into the whole of life. Informational capitalism “fuses” work and worker, putting to work their “entire lives” (Marazzi 2008: 50). Hence Post-Fordist labour is sometimes depicted as “biopolitical labour,” drawing upon life (bios) to create “not only material goods,” but also “relationships,” “social life,” and “subjectivity itself” (Hardt & Negri 2004: 109, x). Denizens of advanced economies must be perpetually clocked on, logged in, GPS-able. The emplaced body can be of less value to capital than the free-ranging mind, as innovative ideas can be the greatest profit returners in this era. The Facebook story is a case in point (ref). For the mental as anything masses, work time increases to the point of being “work without end,” and wages continue to free fall in enforced worship of 'productivity' (Cohen, cited in Marazzi 2008: 41). Any resistance to the totalising logic of biopolitical production must manifest less in those spatialised and temporalised locations formally associated with work, and more across time and space in the interstices of daily existence. As commodification's creep monitors and encloses public space and private time, the need to reinvent ourselves and our forms of social organisation intensifies. Here then is a key to the enormous popularity of filesharing.

Informational capitalism has delivered increasingly cheap information communication technologies (ICTs) along with yawning lines of credit enabling even low-income earners to purchase super-size me plasmas and tiny pods and pads. Similarly various forms of subscription satellite, cable, and streaming services enable access to the latest television series and films. However, such content is typically deformed by both technical restrictions on its reproducibility and embedded advertising, and often limited by the geographical location of the subscriber. For all its global conglomeration, Big Content is hardly cosmopolitan, but rather as nationalistic as modernism's war babies. The business model is industrial, one-to-one plus one: one vendor, one buyer and one product. All seemingly orderly, if old-fashioned. Yet while a substantial market exists for the cultural material doled out from above by aggregates of producers, broadcasters, and ICT infrastructure corporations, so too exists a culturally-differentiated and geographically-dispersed multitude of people committed to new parasitic systems of exchange within the belly of the beast.

What this multitude craves is One Love! And freely-formed networks of desire.

[add paragraph of new paradigm - post post fordism .. networks of pyramical structured nodes... the return of hierarchy... but embedded in a field of networks...]

Ordering Attempts in the Infosphere

The one quality which especially distinguishes digital goods from any other kind of non-organic goods is that they are infinitely reproducible at a negligible cost, and with little or no degradation in technical quality (depending on the method of reproduction used). When the popularity of file-sharing had become so established that Big Content was forced to take action to defend its profitability, it took a tripartite approach. Firstly, it fought battles on legal fronts spanning various national and intra-national jurisdictions. Secondly, it implemented technological barriers to the material reproduction of digitised artefacts, ranging from differentiated forms of encoding DVDs according to region of distribution, to making content playable on only specified hardware formats. And thirdly, it developed commercial products such as subscription-based streaming television in belated response to a largely untapped market. All three modes of attempted ordering have been less than successful, as we shall next see. And in part this failure is attributable to Big Content's fundamental lack of understanding of the transglobal, deeply networked, socially heterogeneous culture they were attempting to constrain and discipline.

Despite a huge investment of time and resources by, the legal battles of the early noughties failed to curb the global expansion of file-sharing. Unsurprisingly, the primary staging ground for these contestations has been the United States, a 'naturally' litigious society, and the home of some very popular downloads including software packtages, blockbuster movies, television series, and music albums. These fights have been framed as being about theft and piracy, using a tradition of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and copyright law which extends back to the medieval period (ref). While in some cases various coalitions of content owners have been been awarded substantial damages, these legal wins have created unexpected consumer backlashes against the film and music industry in particular, especially when popular opinion deems judgements to be harsh and excessive. When Goliath attacks David and wins, the networks of swarming downloaders announce vengeance on websites such as torrentfreak.com, swearing to increase their file-sharing activities on principle.

In 2003 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) led the way in the attempt to re-establish order in the electronic domain via legal means (Bridy 2011: 28-40). As the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) had not foreseen the highly distributed nature of P2P file-sharing, it had not granted copyright owners the automatic right to force ISPs (who were increasingly providers of routing and transmission rather than web storage space) to disclose customer details. Consequently, the RIAA conducted a “coordinated legal campaign” described by Bridy (34-35) as a “class action in reverse, with the aggregation occurring on the defendants' side,” filing 30,000 so-called John Doe law suits over a five year period. One of the highest profile cases was Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas, the first file-sharing copyright infringement lawsuit be tried before a United States jury. Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a young Native American mother of four, was fined more than USD1.92 million for downloading 24 songs, a punishment many deemed to be disproportionate to the 'crime' (Yu 2010: 1389). Upon appeal this fine was heavily reduced to USD54,000, but a third trial in November 2010 to determine damages resulted in a jury awarded the record companies USD1.5 million (USD62,500 per song).

Eventually the public relations fallout from this and other cases caused the RIAA to abandon the mass litigation approach, and in December 2008 the RIAA publicly announced a new emphasis on fostering “greater cooperation” with ISPs (Yu 2010). This marks the shift to a new regime of info-ordering. Nevertheless, as of 2009 new alliances of rights owners (including film producers and commercial pornography makers) are filing new waves of John Doe litigation suits in the United States. This “profit center” mechanism is primarily aimed at gaining out-of-court payments from alleged offenders (Bridy 2011: 36-37) .

Big Content has equated the collective practice of file-sharing with the individual crime of property theft, an economic reductionism which ignores the phenomenon's socio-political and cultural dimensions. This blinkered view partially explains the inability of punitive legal measures to curtail the practice or shift attitudes about its morality. While it is undisputed that many people participate in file-sharing because it is a means of acquiring cultural materials at no direct monetary cost to themselves, even a rudimentary examination of commentary on both tracker sites forums, dedicated file-sharing news websites such as TorrentFreak, and the respected digital news portals Ars Technica, reveals that the reasons why people download are more varied and complex than simply wanting to 'steal' something. Many people report that file-sharing sites are the only places which offered the specific materials they seek. Others express revulsion at how the culture industries are driven only by profit, at the expense of many creative artists and consumers, both of whom were “ripped off” continually by the corporations. This position is frequently accompanied by a stated willingness to pay (music) artists directly for their works, bypassing the “greedy middleman.” Yet others are incensed by the “bullying” tactics of the MPAA (expand acronym) and RIAA with regards to specific lawsuits and position their own file-sharing as an act of solidarity with defendants. (It must be acknowledged that on the whole the level of dialogue within some fora is not particularly high, especially on TorrentFreak, leaving the impression that all file-sharers are angry spoilt young men. On Ars Technica, which is a digital news portal, the debate is qualitatively different).

Legal measures against individual file-sharers were not confined to the handful of high profile lawsuits which garnered so much mainstream and specialist media attention. The more common strategy has been for law firms representing major content rights holders to issue threatening Cease and Desist letters (sometimes with demands for payment) to individuals. By various means, legal and otherwise, the downloading and uploading activities of many can be tracked, and, with the assistance of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), customer contact details acquired. [more on this later]. The main response from file-sharers has played out on the social field: by ignoring the letters and advising others to do similarly, by changing ISPs in favour of businesses that protect customer privacy, and by pro-actively challenging the legality of the threats (ref that dodgy UK company - torrentfreak).

While legal measures targeted individuals, and were resisted by linguistic and legal countermeasures, concurrent technological measures aimed at curtailing the phenomenon were targeted at all ICT users and film and music lovers. While the mass of people affected by them might not have been overly happy with the constraints, it was left to individual hackers to rebuff these measures by developing technological solutions, knowledge of which was subsequently rapidly seeded through communication networks and material objects. Thus file-sharers shifted the technological battleground to the techno-social field, revealing a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of contemporary digital culture than that held by the corporate interests .

DeCSS: can software code be an transglobal expression of free speech?

The contestation between content owners and hackers sparked by the introduction of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) exemplifies the tension between ordering and disordering forces in the electronic realm. American movie studios had insisted that the CSS copy protection mechanism be included within the software engineering requirements for the nascent DVD-Video standard in 1996. The studios' aim was to combat the unauthorised copying of films. This technological attempt to control social behaviour was thwarted by various autonomous hacker groups working on technological countermeasures. In 1999 a Norwegian hacker group fronted by 16 year old Jon Johansen released source code for a DeCSS utility, which enabled people to decrypt and digitise DVD movie discs played in the new DVD computer drives, saving the files to hard drives (Halavais 2003: 123). Because the DeCSS source code contained the algorithm for CSS, numerous other programmers subsequently used it to write similar programs for “ripping” DVDs. Although such ripping stripped away DVD's unique features such as the interactive interface allowing access to film 'chapters', and made cumbersome 4 gigabyte digital files (which however could be converted to 700 megabyte DivX format files), people could now easily exchange cultural media which had been only recently available in the DVD format (Patrizio 1999, no page number).

This digital circumvention project from the hacking underground generated a series of legal challenges in the United States centring on the relationship between software algorithms and free speech, testing the bounds of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) which prohibited people from reverse-engineering hardware and software for illicit purposes. The cases drew media attention to underlying social and political issues surfacing as a result of technological change. While the details of the dozens of DeCSS-related trials are beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that variations of the DeCSS code were not only distributed via numerous internet channels including list-servs, mirror sites, and electronic greeting cards, but also printed on material objects such as t-shirts and ties, translated into audio files and animations, and published by entities such as the geek website Slashdot and the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly (Touretzky 2000, no page number, Halavais 2003: 124). In a landmark ruling (later appealed) Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in favour of the representatives of Big Content, a judgement which included the provocative assertion that hyperlinks (the very foundation of the World Wide Web and the consequent popularisation of the internet) were a “form of 'trafficking' in illegal goods, and therefore illegal under the DMCA” (Halavais 2003: 124).

Big Content in the United States via its Content Scrambling System had sought to impose a technological order upon material objects, DVDs, to prevent the release of their core contents into the unbounded and generally uncontrolled realm of the internet. Various collective efforts from transglobal manifestations of a hacker underground resisted these constraints by finding unprotected back doors into the CSS code and writing algorithms which decrypted the software locks. Unable to respond technologically, a coalition of content owners took the fight to the legal system, targeting those who had circulated specific instances of DeCSS, including even the makers of the DeCSS t-shirts. The DeCSS example illustrates how the social and the technological are deeply interwoven, and how ordering attempts in one or more fields (the technological, the legal) can generate disordering responses that span those same and additional fields (the cultural, the political).

Moreover, the implementation of CSS occurred within an old industrial model of both technical innovation and social organisation: a small cadre of salaried programmers developed a technological fix to a social problem anticipated by their employers, and the resultant product was marketed without regard to consumers' expressed desire to be able to copy DVDs. This imposition of a form of technological enclosures disregarded the unquestionably legitimate activity of backing up forms of media (audio CDs or film DVDs) which are unstable and liable to be unusable if scratched or otherwise physically damaged. Duplicating one's own media also makes it available to be played via other digital devices, a point which although not pressing in the 1990s, has become absolutely critical in the contemporary electronic landscape of multiple digital devices.

In contrast, the development and release of the numerous iterations of DeCSS exemplifies a postindustrial, network form of innovation and organisation. Mirroring one of the precepts of Toyotaism, that is, attending to marketplace desires, which conveniently dovetailed with software culture's ultra-libertarian ideology, programmers identified a techno-social problem: the curtailing of cultural freedom via technology. Consequently, self-managed, loosely-organised, and sometimes spatially-dispersed groups of independent programmers concurrently worked to unscramble CSS. The first successful solution was disseminated via transglobal electronic networks and geospatially-emplaced material artefacts, ensuring its rapid adoption by a computer-savvy multitude, and its reversioning and redistribution by other hackers. Moreover, the escalating cycles of conflict set in motion by DeCSS drew in other networks of solidarity and support, from across both computing subcultures and the legal-political fields.

The disorder DeCSS created a foundation for new transdiciplinary knowledge production, from software code to legal arguments. CSS had spawned a bastard child, DeCSS, and in turn DeCSS contributed to the expansion of networks of productive resistance, and the loose communities which coalesced within these networks. Hackers and file-sharers had expanded the technological battleground to the techno-social field, revealing a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of contemporary digital culture than that held by the corporate interests which was primarily concerned about limiting circulation of the new, believing that unauthorised copying would negatively effect their financial bottom line.

Over time empirical research on the buying habits of file-sharers has revealed that the dogma that 'piracy' diminishes corporate profits is not supported by the facts. UK research.... other research.....

Over a decade on, it is instructive to reflect on the passionate fight for an unlocked DVD format in the 1990s compared to the more recent explosion of proprietary hardware formats, and the public's acceptance of the barriers they impose on free circulation of content. The Apple Corporation has led the vanguard, with its iPhones, iPods, and iPads, and although it is not impossible to hack these devices so that they can more readily accept and exchange materials, the constraints have been embedded into the systems, requiring labour to disembed them. The Windows world is not much better, with special formatting and partitioning required to make portable hard drives able to receive files such as music and films from Apple computers.

What can we conclude from the mass embrace of proprietary formats? Has the sexiness of the design and marketing of the new miniaturised platforms seduced their owners into accepting the electronic chastity belts which accompany them? Does it make us more inclined to limit those important embodied, socialised forms of content exchange (such as taking your hard drive to a friend's place and swapping files after dinner) to situations where we all own the same genus of machines, in a form of self-imposed digital apartheid? Have we become less sensitised in general to the growing complexity of the machines which we interact with on a regular basis—cars, washing machines, sound systems—and the concomitant inability to take a peek under the hood? While the free software movement has significantly contributed the collective construction of code from the ground up, and more localised free wireless initiatives have done the same for pirate or community radio and television broadcasts, in general the field of consumer electronics fosters a passive acquiescence to the machine limitations. Leaving these speculations to one side for now, let us now return to the evolution of file-sharing software and the creation of new informal networks and loose communities.

From Napster's centralised one-on-one to BitTorrent's deep distributed peer-to-peer

Napster was a proto P2P service developed by university student Shawn Fanning and launched in June 1999. Like the later massively popular social networking environment Facebook, Napster was Boston born and bred, coming from and responding to the desires of a privileged class of digital natives, who had grown up post early post-Fordism and pre-dotcom bust, more West Wing than The Wire. Building upon earlier, clunkier methods of distributed filesharing (including text-based communications platforms Usenet and Internet Relay Chat, and the later client/server platform Hotline) Napster offered people a direct way to share music files which had been digitised in the then-new highly compressed MP3 audio file format. Napster used its own servers to maintain a central registry which displayed computers logged on to the system, and the shareable music files they contained. Users could then use Napster's web interface to directly connect with these computers to retrieve files. Napster only lasted two years until a series of legal challenges from a coalition of recording companies and individual bands (most infamously the heavy metal 'rebels' Metallica) eventually forced it to declare bankruptcy. By this time the platform had generated a groundswell of filesharing activity amongst an estimated 25 million users, many of them riding on the bandwidth of North American universities. Moreover, it had created a collective unquenchable thirst for discovering and sharing the artefacts of popular culture online.

Paradoxically, one of the main seedbeds of informational capitalism in terms of cognitive labourers and technological innovation, the tertiary education sector, was simultaneously nourishing a phenomenon which would challenge capitalism's sacred cows—such as return on investment from the production of scarcity and secrecy. Innovation was streaming through the networks from below, and although in Napster's case there were clear commercial goals driving the project's founding business team, the desires and appetites for cultural materials being fed by the software system signalled something which probably never had been imagined or codified in any business plan. The mixed (cassette) tape, that 'old' music compilation format of the 1970s and 1980s which had provided the soundtrack to countless friendships, love affairs, protests, and rites of passage, was reborn as individualised downloaded playlists subsequently burnt onto now-affordable Compact Disks and circulated in the spatialised world. More significant than this technological shift from one-off 'hand-crafted' analogue tapes to infinitely reproducible digital media however was the emergence of a new social paradigm, that of sharing amongst strangers.

The development of the BitTorrent communications protocol was fundamental to the evolution of this paradigm during the post-Napster era. BitTorrent, written by software programmer Bram Cohen, was released in July 2001 via an announcement on a Yahoo internet group. In computing, protocol refers to formats and rules for how machines (hardware/software assemblages) communicate and exchange data with one another. Whereas Napster had relied on both a centralised indexed file registry and one-to-one exchanges between pairs of peers who needed to consciously seek each other via the registry, the BitTorrent protocol enabled the creation of file-sharing “swarms.” A person would use various BitTorrent “clients” (software applications) to “announce” that they were “seeding” (distributing) a particular file from their computer. (Endnote? Each net-connected device has a unique net address or Internet Protocol address (IP address)). The protocol enabled BitTorrent software clients to break a file into small chunks, which others could download, chunk by chunk. As these downloaders incrementally acquired the file chunks, they would automatically “seed” them, thus taking the bandwidth pressure off the original “seeder” and making the process of file transference completely distributed over the internet. Thus the BitTorrent protocol harnessed the network power of the internet and its users, capitalising on the disorderly, unpredictable nature of technological and social networks to produce a system whose stability rested upon a foundation of complete chaos.

Everyone in a torrent swarm becomes a peer, the original uploader/seeder and the subsequent downloaders who are concurrently also seeders. The process is messy and unpredictable, embodying a convergence of technological and social issues. People (including the initial file seeder) drop in and out of swarms, bandwidth can become choked, incomplete or corrupted versions of files compromise the integrity of downloads, wildly divergent upload and download speeds amongst swarm members, and legal threats to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and downloaders, are some of the typical challenges. However, the BitTorrent protocol was expressly designed to handle such variables, and because each file can be transmitted as non-sequential chunks by any and all logged-on nodes within a swarm, the inherently random, uncontrollable nature of the technological aspect of the process paradoxically assists an eventually ordered delivery of a requested file on someone's internet-connected device.

Compared to earlier platforms such as Napster, because BitTorrent could handle large files easily, it became possible to share more than relatively small music files. Hence the diverse selection of cultural artefacts in underground circulation came to include movies, computer games, television episodes and indeed whole series, and software applications. As a consequence of this technological expansion the demographic composition of file-sharers became more heterogeneous, and the young, white, male college-educated cadre were joined by increasing numbers of people who did not fit that narrow identikit. This shift mirrored how the internet itself was become more diverse in terms of its users' ages, ethnicities, genders, spatial localities, and socio-economic class (ref). In turn, the popularisation of file-sharing further diversified the make-up of the internet's “netizens.”

While BitTorrent software clients enabled the technical exchange of digital files, in the deeply decentralised post-Napster paradigm something else was needed in order for people to search and find the cultural materials they desired from a swarm of strangers. From this need arose a host of “tracker” websites which facilitated file-sharing by storing meta-data indices of downloadable material scattered across the internet. It is important to note that such tracker sites were not libraries hosting the digitised materials on their own servers, they were more like phone books, offering small 'tracker' files which pointed to the materials' locations on peer computers. Tracker sites performed an ordering function; they indicated where specific artefacts could be located from an untold number of digital materials available to be downloaded from seeds scattered across the physical world and electronic nets.

These tracker sites bifurcated into public trackers and private trackers. Public trackers can be accessed by anyone, and no download limits or “ratios” (the balance between files downloaded and seeded) were imposed on individuals' activities. Some well-regarded public trackers such as Demonoid are theoretically open to all, but only during periods when they open membership via their website or invites. Public trackers often reflect the disorganised, sprawling nature of the internet, with content being ordered in a handful of broad categories (television, anime, music, etcetera), and a wide range of file formats allowed. User comments are often the only semi-reliable guide as to the quality of the seeded material. Over time certain public trackers have attracted massive user bases only to disappear, usually in response to legal threats or action taken against them by Big Content (coalitions of content owners). Others have stood their ground and fought back, garnering moral and political if not financial support from their users, with The Pirate Bay being the emblematic example (to be discussed in more detail later on).

In contrast to the open nature of public trackers, private tracker sites function to exclude most of those who would want to join them. With membership closed to the hoi polloi new users can only be admitted in limited situations including on the recommendation of existing members, conditional invitations made available on other tracker sites (in which the invitee must prove their level of existing contributions), and via the 'illegal' selling or auctioning of memberships. Due to the imminent legal threats faced by tracker sites, some of the most exclusive private tracker sites have become highly secretive, forbidding members to mention the sites' names on online fora. One of the most revered private trackers was Oink's Pink Palace (OiNK), a site dedicated to the creation of a community of music lovers via the sharing of music. OiNK captured the enthusiasm of around 200,000 people and access to their music collections, and its meticulously organised repository of high-quality formatted music files was regarded as a gold standard in file-sharing. The site was active between 2004-2007 until its creator, software engineer Alan Ellis, was charged with conspiracy to defraud, thus becoming the first person in Britain to stand trial for file-sharing (Ellis was found not guilty in January 2010) (ref )

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement's (ACTA) production of networked battlegrounds in the new global info-order

Despite some significant legal wins in battles against Napster, Kazaa (explain), torrent aggregator websites such as MiniNova, and individual file-sharers, during the first decade of new millennium the various alliances of Big Content were consistently losing the larger info-war of shifting peoples' attitudes towards, and practices of, file-sharing. Admonishment just wasn't working on those unruly hearts and minds, and instead disorder reigned wildly. People who had purchased films, music, books, software, and other cultural artefacts argued that they had a right to circulate digital copies of those materials over the internet, just as one might lend a book or a DVD to a friend. Moreover, people wanted to be able to share their enthusiasm for artefacts and their makers, by setting up discussion fora on the torrent sites they inhabited. So circulation encompassed not only content, but also ideas and information about that content. Networks for file-sharing extend way beyond a technological facility to encompass some timeless aspects of what it means to be human, which includes the ability to tell stories about stories, a meta-level story telling. As the activities of popular torrent sites like SuprNova and Mininova were forced to distribute only certain materials or monetise their exchanges, a thousand other tracker sites bloomed.

Unable to significantly impact behaviours of individuals populating these networks, in 2008 various manifestations of Big Content shifted gear by initiating a two-pronged attack targeting Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and sovereign governments (Bridy 2011: 44). If individual and collective behaviour of an increasingly heterogeneous class of info-serfs was out of control, then control needed to employ other means of expression. Firstly, transglobal corporations through their professional organisations insisted that ISPs around the world step up to the plate and monitor and discipline their customers' downloading behaviours. Secondly, they lobbied national governments to enforce this by introducing legislation favouring the interests of (often transnational or multinational) corporations over their citizens. The new “graduated response” or “three strikes” protocols gathered steam, with governments within Britain, Europe, Canada, and across Asia enthusiastically drawing up relatively similar laws to present to their parliaments (Bridy 2011: 44). Perhaps because of its deeply libertarian values applied to home turf issues, the United States industry groups have held back from pushing a “statutorily mandated” system, opting instead to pursue “voluntary agreements” with ISPs (Bridy 2010: 45). A selective snapshot of recent three strikes legislation across three countries, France, X and X, and the overarching Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which is the apex of the coordinated international lobbying campaign by corporate rights owners, demonstrates Big Content's extraordinary power to influence, or attempt to influence, democratically elected governments.

The lengthy negotiations by 38 countries surrounding the drafting of the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) have been enveloped in secrecy resistant even to Freedom of Information requests, according to special interest groups and scholars locked out of the process (Geist 2009, np). The ACTA treaty evolved outside of “conventional” policy-making venues such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization, but rather has been negotiated through a “private network of, by and for invited corporate insiders,” noted activist and author David Bollier (2009, np). Such circumstances foster “policy laundering,” that is, the use of “Trojan horse” international treaties to “justify the passage of controversial legislation within one’s own country, ” smuggling in “more expansive substantive rights” disguised as “better-coordinated enforcement” (Public Knowledge, quoted in Bollier; Bridy 2010: 7). As with other multilateral lateral agreements (MAI, TRIPS, GATT, NAFTA, and so forth) deliberate non-transparency masks the simultaneously all-encompassing and minutely-detailed agendas of a class of powerful elites, in this case those associated with the convergent media, entertainment, and telecommunications industries. Consequently, treaty signatories can exclude the wishes of ordinary citizens regarding the contested issues.

With the United States being a significant treaty driver in 2008 some expected that the newly-installed Obama Administration would relax ACTA's secrecy provisions,. Instead the US government determined that the draft text was a “matter of national security,” withholding even the negotiators' names from Freedom of Information requests, “while sharing the negotiating text secretly with hundreds of industry lobbyists” (Love 2010, np). As I argue throughout this paper, ordering attempts inevitably produce disordering functions, which generate their own socially prodictive momentum. Over time negotiations details and actual draft documents leaked out from the ACTA info-bunkers, which increased pressure on governments to open up the process. By March 2009 what little was known about ACTA came from a July 2008 “discussion memo” posted on Wikileaks Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa (2010, np), has played a leading role in analysing such leaked content particularly as it applies to Canada, maintaining an online repository of key documents, as has James Love through the auspices of Knowledge Ecology International (see 'The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)' 2011). While a number of legal activists from organisations such as Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) have weighed in on the ACTA debate, law professor Annemarie Bridy's (2010) comparative analysis of leaked documents stands out for both its thoroughness and non-partisan approach.

Although no longer available at Wikileaks (possibly due to data disruption caused by post-Cablegate mirroring of this site) I had previously downloaded this document. Entitled 'Japan – US Joint Proposal', its physicality is intriguing, being a very poorly photocopied artefact which bears the signs of a quick stealthy session by a mole at a copier. Some other leaked documents appear less harried. It is not clear who are the ACTA whistle-blowers, but presumably they are people engaged with the negotiating process at a high enough level to have decided that it is in the (global and national) public interest these documents are opened up to wider scrutiny. The leaked documents thus become raw materials for cultural activists, privacy campaigners, legal experts, and interested others to support arguments against ACTA which, due to the secrecy, have been primarily formulated on political, philosophical, and ethical grounds. The negotiating texts become concrete proof of the intentions of the anonymous negotiators, revealing which parties will benefit from the treaty's provisions and which will be disempowered. Moreover, subtle linguistic shifts in the various iterations reveal the subtext of the tensions amongst the negotiating parties themselves, disorder within the ordering project, as Bridy (2010: 7-11) demonstrates.

In March 2010 the European Parliament voted 633 to 13 to force the disclosure of the negotiating text, forcing a “one time release” of the ACTA negotiating text on 16 April 2010 (Love 2010, np). Subsequently only the United States has blocked additional releases of the draft treaty. In a Resolution aimed at finalising ACTA details, in November 2010 the European Parliament noted the “public criticism of the secrecy of the negotiations as a clear signal of the political unsustainability of the negotiation process adopted,” thereby recommending that the ACTA Committee “operate in an open, inclusive and transparent manner” (Rinaldi et al 2000, np). The European representatives had recognised the tactic of secrecy had completely failed to enable the construction of a new global info-order, and instead had opened the negotiating process to attacks from numerous quarters. Order had produced disorder, and this disorder was generating its own transglobal constituency who were sharing information, ideas, strategies, and resources.

The rise of the 'graduated response' approach to file-sharers

Through its various iterations, the draft ACTA treaty has centred on internationally-cooperative mechanisms to enforce Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) covering copyright, trademarks, and patents. While the treaty clearly targets commercial counterfeiting operations, so too is the phenomenon of file-sharing within its ambit. This has concerned both lobby groups focused on digital privacy issues and also ISPs, who have found themselves to be potentially burdened with the tripartite role of surveillance officer, informer, and punisher in a digital panopticon scenario. When the final draft was publicly released, some earlier provisions, including the mandating the implementation of harsh punitive regimes against individual file-sharers, had been omitted ('ACTA Consolidated Text, Informal Predecisional/Deliberative Draft, 2 October 2010'). Pressure from inside and outside the formal process that the treaty be “more protective of the parties' sovereign prerogatives in areas relating to substantive rights, liabilities, and exceptions” had caused this apparent retreat (Bridy 2010: 8). Nevertheless “graduated response” measures remained “tacitly endorsed” by both the preamble and provisions promoting “greater cooperation between rights owners and service providers” (Bridy 2010: 1).

Moreover, powerful copyright advocates including the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) have operated concurrently outside of the treaty framework, pressuring individual governments in an “especially aggressive” way to insist that ISPs adopt an “active role in policing copyrights online” (Bridy 2010: 2). And furthermore, some countries, including the United States and Ireland, are exploring “private ordering” options in addition to “public law mechanisms” to enforce online copyright (Bridy 2010: 2). The ACTA project's overall success is demonstrated by the general acceptance by governments, if not their citizens, that the State must play a major role to protect the interests of corporations in the information age. Clearly, the invisible hand of the market is not strong enough to control the activities of the wilful masses, but the strong arm tactics of the State have not produced quiet acquiescence as the French example demonstrates.

In May 2009 the French Parliament passed the Création et Internet law requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to undertake a “graduated response” or “three strikes” protocols in relation to their account customers who were deemed to be engaged in alleged copyright infringements.The French version of this protocol first had been seeded in a 2004 report by France's High Council of Literary and Artistic Property, was then ignored when I 2006 France amended laws to comply with an EU directive requiring “harmonization” of copyright law, and subsequently resurfaced in a 2007 French Ministry of Culture report recommending the establishment of an administrative body to oversee a “system of warnings and sanctions” (Bridy 2011: 52). Hence, Création et Internet had been preceded by a five year period in which the basic idea of ISP involvement in direct punishment of file-sharers had been socialised via policy papers and commissioned research. Firstly, they would have to issue two warnings to such customers. Upon the third alleged infringement the ISP would be legally obligated to immediately terminate their customers' internet accounts (Bridy 2011: 52-56). A centralised blacklist would ensure that such terminated customers could not simply switch ISPs (Anderson 2009b, np).

Moreover, the law enabled ISPs to block popular file-sharing sites, and would penalise people for not securing their personal internet connections against illicit uses by others, especially via wireless networks. Although other countries including the United States, Italy, and Ireland had discussed similar legislation, France was the first country to write it into law (Anderson 2009a, np). The law, also known as HADOPI (High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet) after the administrative body which would implement it, had received significant public opposition. Furthermore, it contravened a European Parliament decision concluding that such punitive legislation would “violate the fundamental rights and freedoms of Internet users” (Ernesto 2009, np). One month after the law had been passed France’s highest legal authority, the Constitutional Council, ruled that the enforced loss of Internet access would be unconstitutional and blocked this provision, empowering HADOPI only to warn identified downloaders but not to punish them by cutting their internet accounts. But just as the technological battlefields on which contestations over file-sharing take place are continually shifting, so too legal terrains exist in a state of constant flux.

In September 2009 a second iteration of HADOPI was passed into law. Infringement activities are detected by commercial internet security companies engaged by rights owners, thus bringing increasing rings of ordering mechanisms into the overall process, and concomitantly, the potential for generating new kinds of disorder. The security companies employ network monitoring software to detect alleged infringements, and then transmit the following details to the rights owners: “the IP address from which the files in question were available, the ISP of the alleged infringer, and the date and time of the alleged infringement,” who in turn refer the each instance to HADOPI (ibid.). Some concerns about privacy had been taken on board by not allowing HADOPI to disclose an infringer's identity to rights owners, but only to the ISP. ISPs are required to issue warnings to customers within 24 hours of receiving a HADOPI notification. If three alleged infringements occur within one year, HADOPI contacts a prosecutor, who brings the matter before a judge. Without undertaking any judicial investigation the judge can ban a person from using the internet for up to one year (Anderson 2009c, np). However, people have the right to appeal such judgements (Bridy 2011: 54).

By October 2010 a French music industry body reported that their members, using a range of technological monitoring mechanisms to detect file-sharing activities, were sending around 25,000 music-related copyright infringements notifications to HADOPI per day (Pichevi 2010, np). However, based on a sample of 2,000 internet users, researchers from the University of Rennes in Brittany found that file-sharing had increased by 3 per cent since HADOPI, although people were changing how they obtained cultural materials, drifting from BitTorrent tracker sites towards both streaming content and direct download sites (Anderson 2010a, np). The study also discovered a clear relationship between the download and purchase of content, with fifty per cent of digital music and video online purchasers also admitting to illicit downloading. The researchers concluded that HADOPI's banning of downloaders from the 'internet might “eliminate 27 percent of all Internet buyers of music and video,” thus paradoxically impacting the profits Big Content had used the law to protect (ibid.).

-----------------

next para: spanish wikileaks revelations....pressure from US to change laws on ISPs

Disorderly Conduct: some initial reflections on file-sharing

doll_yoko — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:28:05 +0000

The phenomenon of "peer to peer", or "P2P" file-sharing over the internet is a transglobal expression of techno-social relations. We could say the same about other popular domesticised forms of internet usage, such as email, searches, blogging and photo sharing. However, P2P is different, like the 'special' child who doesn't really fit in with the rest of the family.

Due to its ambiguous legal status, and its often contestational nature, it is one of the net's black sheep, but fundamentally more adorable than some of the others. Here I am thinking of repugnant net uses (creepy paedophile exchanges using tightly secured networks), annoying uses (dissemination of spam, adware, pointless e-petitions, chainmail), and malicious uses ( trojans, malware, phishing).

This syncretic phenomenon weaves together disparate traditions, ideologies, philosophies and practices. The result is a globalised, anational sphere of relations, simultaneously simple and complex, horizontal with some verticals in the mix. These relations influence the social shaping of the internet. In particular, P2P reanimates the early internet predecessor's primary function—the co-operative building of a network for sharing knowledge. Moreover, it extends the World Wide Web's core aim of easy document sharing.But this time it is protocols and software clients based on BitTorrent that enables much of the world's P2P activity, rather than the Hypertext Mark Up Language, or HTML, that enabled the creation of the World Wide Web. By unpicking some of the dimensions of peer to peer, examining it as a set of interconnected technologies, a generative sphere, and a field of intense communicative and cultural exchange, I propose that the phenomenon exhibits and exploits both hierarchies of order and also tangles of disorder. .

Peer to peer is a constitutive force with wider political implications, which is what makes it so interesting. It is a manifestation of innovative, constantly renewing forms of production and exchange that devour capitalist relations with oft-expressed relish. Its field of operations is within the heart of informational capitalism itself. Meanwhile, the aging body of the old order is burdened with pre-digital industrial, cultural and legal structures. This bloomered legacy is finding it increasingly difficult to get a leg up, let alone a leg over, in an era where peers are defiantly doing it for themselves, and each other.

I have been involved at the user level of P2P for only a few years, making me a relative latecomer compared to enthusiasts who began in the 1990s. Delving into the technical operations of P2P at the code and protocol levels I discovered that researchers approach the phenomenon using quite narrow frames of reference. Within the humanities field, the focus is on the tensions between intellectual property, copyright regimes, privatisation of knowledge and culture, and the evolution of a 'digital commons'. And in the Information Technology field, a search of academic databases uncovers a vast mass of articles dealing with technical aspects of P2P—papers with titles like 'Resource demand and supply in BitTorrent content-sharing communities', 'Safe Peer-to-Peer Self-Downloading', and 'Profiling a Million User DHT'. Clearly P2P has been exciting software engineers and network analysts for quite some time.

Yet peer to peer could be examined through other lenses, to encompass other fields of knowledge. Not only philosophy but economics, linguistics, art history, politics, cognitive sciences, game theory, globalism studies, and ethics, could enrich our understanding of this expanding phenomenon. For example, in terms of P2P's productive potential it is helpful to employ the Fluxus concept of 'intermedia'. What might be created in the interstitial spaces between P2P and architecture, between P2P and neuroscience, between the syncretism of P2P and the syncretism of voudou? And how could order and disorder play out in these particular instances of intermediality? Similarly, a serious exploration of the praxis of DIY, or Do It Yourself, and its prefiguring, and enactment, of social change provides another lens to illuminate P2P, just as it does with punk culture.

But before such metaphysical explorations can take place, a basic understanding of the mechanics of P2P is useful. And so we start with some definitions and significations.

Firstly, peer to peer refers to the social process of internet-based 'file sharing', a form of information exchange occuring typically amongst people whose real-life identities are masked by their online nicknames or their DNS numbers (the addresses of their computer on the internet). The shared files are generally cultural artefacts, and include digitised films, television series, music recordings, graphic files, software packages, electronic books, technical tutorials and computer games. Usually the copyright attached to these artefacts has been assigned to so-called content owners (generally not creators of original material, but rather publishing houses, national and multinational media conglomerates). Therefore their localised digital reproduction and translocal gratis exchange amongst file-sharing peers contravenes copyright law to varying degrees in the many jurisdictions that have legislated intellectual property regimes. The enforcement of such regimes is a different kettle of fish however.

Due to its ambivalent and relative legal status, the practice of P2P is sometimes said to be inhabiting a creating a 'grey commons'. This shadowy grey commons conjures up different images, evoking for some total social disorder, and for others the seeds of a new social order. Protagonists of P2P are cast, or cast themselves, as pirates, outlaws, data dandies, or info anarchists. Activist coders Palle Torsson and Rasmus Fleischer explored some of these ideas in their widely distributed address to a computer congress in Berlin in December 2005. In The Grey Commons - strategic considerations in the copyfight, Torsson argues that:

It is not a grey commons in terms of the law but as possibility, as technology and technique. It is not optional but inscribed in the technique we use every day. The grey is not here exactly by an effort but rather as the shortest way to make life work with technology. The shading, the tuning and twisting is omnipresent; it is not something you can wish away. What this really is about is our conditions of living, how information is used, transferred and owned in society. As humans, creators, amateurs or fans, in a desire for pleasure and in a chain of small habits we make the world appear....With the remix as the norm, steps to a democratization of creativity are taken and in the process we are liberating the myth of a special class of artists isolated from the rest of us fans, amateurs or consumers.Palle Torsson and Rasmus Fleischer, The Grey Commons - strategic considerations in the copyfight, Speech transcript to 22C3, Berlin, December 2005. Source

While proponents of the grey commons embrace the creative chaos of promiscuous sharing, the players on the neighbouring conceptual turf of the digital commons have a different approach, siding more with the rule of law and order, arguing to change the law rather than questioning its underlying premises. The notional digital commons has been heavily promoted, made respectable and ready for semi- or full commodification by power players in academia and legal spheres. The quest of techno-libertarian Lawrence Lessig and his foot soldiers is well-documented, and orderly with its proliferation of 'content' licenses. It is, I suspect, almost as boring as Scientology, but without the fun of those funky Thetans. The custodians, spokespersons and gleaners on this more orderly electronic commons often seem quite earnest—the wikipedians, Creative Commons licensees, citizen journos, bloggers and their reading cadres. Of course these two renderings of an immaterial commons, so far in time and space from local histories of fertile forests and fields, do not signify mutually exclusive spheres of ideas and practices. In reality, the relations are intertwined, and to some extent, interdependent, and both involve the core practice of sharing information, knowledges, and opinions. MOOers, MUDDERs, MIPPERS, and Second Lifers often straddle both spheres for example.

The second meaning of P2P refers to the suite of software programs that enable this form of digital exchange. They are based around the breaking up of whole files into numerous discrete parts which can be shared amongst people connected to the internet. Release details and technical discussions of P2P softwares and their development trajectories occur in mainly geeky realms, such as slashdot.org. The various kinds of P2P softwares for digitising material and uploading the digitised files can be cross-platform (different versions of the same program to run on Linux, PC or Mac operating systems), or platform-specific.

The programs have been developed by enthusiasts—individual developers and small groups who often are aligned with open source and/or free software (FLOSS) philosophies, and sometimes with specific communities. Consequently, the production of these programs has been subject to the relatively ordered and communicative regime of distributed software development. Order is either mutually agreed upon (or in some cases 'decreed' by the lead developer) to avoid the technical problem of 'forking'.Forking occurs when different developers take the software in divergent directions, resulting in unecessary duplication of labour resulting in incompatible versions of the same program. It could be considered a form of technical and social disorder produced when two orders, one existent, the other in a state of becoming, emerge in the same spatio-temporal field.

Adhering to FLOSS principles, the typically small P2P softwares are distributed online, free of charge. Specific softwares emerge, are subsequently improved upon, and sometimes disappear. The 'disappeared' have generally removed themselves, or been removed, through threatened and enacted legal actions instigated by corporate content owners and industry lobby groups. The infamous antecedent of P2P, the Napster file-sharing software, more homo sedens than homo sapiens in the evolutionary scheme of P2P, is a case in point.Napster, developed in 1998 by student Shawn Fanning, was fundamentally different software to Bit Torrent, as it involved direct file exchanges between peers. According to Kurt Fritz, "Napster was not a true P2P network because the site maintained a central server with information on where music files resided in the network" (Fritz, K, 'Playing a Different Tune', Information Today, December 2008). The Kazaa case is a more recent example.

But resistance is not always futile, as demonstrated by P2P facilitators, Swedish-based The Pirate Bay (TPB). The Pirate Bay facilitate file-sharing by storing on their servers meta-data indices of material scattered across the internet on people's home computers that is available to be downloaded. These digitised materials themselves are not stored by TPB, only small 'tracker' files which point to their locations on peer computers. The Pirate Bay is run by a small autonomous group, whose members refused to capitulate to corporate pressure exerted through United States laws when their servers were seized by the Swedish police. Their defiant stance has gained widespread support not only in Sweden, but amongst an international cohort of file-sharers. The verdict in the recent court case against them found them guilty of aiding file-sharing, and imposed hefty fines and a year's jail time for each of the 4 defendants.Source However, as the case will be appealed, many commentators anticipate the ruling will be overturned. Big Media's hegemonic order cannot sleep soundly yet.

The third sense of P2P refers to the wider sphere of production and circulation. This includes the human nodes and material networks of faciliating techno-social 'machines' such as TPB, Mininova, Demonoid and others. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are important components of this spehere. The original raison d'etre of ISPs in the mid-1990s was to facilitate people's access to internet services such as email, news groups, and the emerging World Wide Web. The line in was slow—remember the thrill of upgrading from a 720 baud modem to a 1400? Today the landscape has totally changed and ISPs make big profits by selling contracts offering ultra-fast download speeds plus gigabytes of download traffic. Now the only reason someone besides the online gamers would want it so fast and hard, is because they are engaging in P2P. So a very sizable industry exists built on the desires of millions of peers in thousands of locations across the globe. Order (business models, technical infrastructures, returns on investments) literally streaming out of a very disorderly multitude. It is hardly surprising that ISPs in most countries are currently vigorously resisting the attempts of the State/Big Media complex to monitor and constrain the activities of their profit-producing client base. The symbiotic relationship between P2P and ISPs, explored through the lense of productive disorder, is a subject meriting some serious research.

Production in the context of P2P is in fact more a matter of post-production, than the creation of something 'original'. It involves the digitisation of cultural artefacts, either by capturing live streamed content (from digital tv and pay television) with a software like AverTV and compressing it with a different program, or by ripping material from digital storage media such as audio CDs, DVDs, software disks, and e-books using capture and processing softwares. There are different processes and softwares for digitising different kinds of original materials.

People who undertake this labour, digitising the cultural artefacts and making them available online via their own computers (seeding), are both rippers and initial seeders. Seeding also encompasses the activity of downloaders, who in an ideal P2P world, maintain the practice of keeping artefacts accessible on their individual computers for a period of time, thereby maintaining a viable network of file sharers, or peers, for any one file. When a file is not reseeded by anyone it is for all intents and purposes dead.

Consequently, it is considered neighbourly to do both of these things, rip and seed, especially the latter. Seeding is a way of giving back to the virtual and ephemeral community that forms around an artefact. Anyone who has the minimum bandwidth for uploading (seeding) files, and who is not constrained by legal factors (in some jurisdictions downloading is permitted whereas uploading is not), can, in theory, be a seeder. Ripping, however, requires some technical knowledge about how to optimise video and audio file compression. Given the poor quantity of numerous rips out in the world, ripping is not for everyone. However, more people stay in the role of leechers, those who take without either doing the initial work, or who download and then take their copy of the artefact off the network, thereby not contributing to the ongoing and broadly distributed task of file sharing.This ratio is easily verifiable by comparing the number of downloads of a particular file with the number of people actually seeding it. To be a leecher is to be scorned by the community-that-is-not-a-community.

How do ripping, seeding and leeching relate to the workshop's theme of disorder? The process of ripping, to be productive in the sense of achieving a good outcome, that is, a decent copy of the original file, requires an orderly and methodical approach. As people build online reputations based on the quality of their rips, order is valorised, in terms of peer esteem. A few dud rips and years of net rep can go down the drain. This is not the place for a DIY attitude based solely on disorder and intuitiveness, no staring into chaos's abyss.

Ripping is an act that is both destructive and creative. For example, an initial seeder might rip an original DVD of the Taviani Brothers' film Kaos using the Handbrakea software, or capture a video stream using VirtualDub. These softwares in a way atomise the digital data packets, then recompress the components, and stitch it all back together again. The copy is visibly and audibly daggier than the original; this is no seamless reproduction, but a bit of a hack, a messy workaround the problem of compressing an original file down to something a tenth of its size. And in the digital world, size does matter.

After an artefact has been ripped, it needs to be placed online and indexed, so that peer downloaders can locate it. Many popular P2P clients such as µTorrent and Vuze implement the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.“Programmer Bram Cohen designed the protocol in April 2001 and released a first implementation on 2 July 2001.[1] It is now maintained by Cohen's company BitTorrent, Inc. Usage of the protocol accounts for significant Internet traffic, though the precise amount has proven difficult to measure. There are numerous BitTorrent clients available for a variety of computing platforms.” Source: Wikipedia. Each BitTorrent client can prepare, request and transmit any digital artefact over a computer network via this protocol. Utorrent and other clients work in the following way:

To share a file or group of files, a seeder first creates a small file called a torrent (eg, kaos_DVDrip.torrent). This file contains metadata about the files to be shared and about the tracker, the computer that coordinates the file distribution.

The seeder then uploads the torrent to the internet, sending it to one or more tracker sites.

Peers wanting to download the file must first obtain a torrent file for it, and connect to the specified tracker, which automates connections with other peers who have the complete file, or who are in the process of downloading it, packet by packet.Ibid.

Circulation of artefacts is enabled through specific websites, which do not store the actual artefacts, but contain indexes of torrent files. These indices contain elements of order and disorder, often relating to how well they are monitored and maintained by their human guardians—the sys admins and others. These websites index and describe the artfacts, and, depending on the system, may or not contain other information on trackers.

A tracker “maintains lists of the clients currently participating in the torrent. Alternatively, in a trackerless system (decentralized tracking) every peer acts as a tracker.”Ibid. There are numerous such facilitating sites which range from the general (an analogy could be a public library) like mininova.org, demonoid.com and isohunt to the niche (specialty bookshop) like secret-cinema.net and thebox.bz. Such sites, typically run by volunteers and deriving income from advertising, often also are home to discussion forums, technical FAQs, search clouds, socialising areas, and meta-data on users/members. This meta-data varies from site to site, and can include information on members' (avatars') interests, and lists of artefacts they have downloaded.

This aspect of P2P also requires a high level of order to function smoothly, as they are essentially libraries with vast repositories. Trackers must be kept online and named correctly; indexing of material into categories and sub-categories assists downloaders find what they are searching for; moderated discussion forums enable people to place requests for specific artefacts and to comment on those already in circulation; and comments sections attached to each artefact facilitates the exchange of information amongst peers on the technical quality of each rip. Disorder in these libraries manifests in unwelcome and destructive ways. A major problem is the insertion of malware, viruses and trojans into seemingly innocent digital files. Password-protected files often signal such danger. It is rumoured that agents acting on behalf of the big content owners, a cadre of dark rippers, are responsible for much of this disorder.

On the other hand, the seeding of files is a paradigm of positive disorder. Although some P2P softwares like Vuze have visualisation functions, where diagrams of the seed dynamically portray the file and its seeders, the animation tantalises without satisfying.

Seeding involves strangers sharing with strangers, each one motivated by a mix of self-interest, principle and altruism. Seeding is one big series of questions, and very few answers. You never know who you are seeding to, how long they will stay online for, if they will like what you are sharing with them, how they might make use of it, and so on. The whole system is built upon anonymity, randomness, and chance. And this is its strength, because compared to earlier software programs that enabled file sharing through systems of identification and storage of complete files, the later "bit torrent" programs depend on fragmentation and limited identification. From this apparently disordered base, this rejection of naming and taming, a meshwork of nodes and networks involving millions of people around the world has evolved.

Leeching, like ripping, tends more on the side of order. Even if a peer has no intention of giving back to the imaginary community by seeding their downloads, a certain amount of order in file management is required. If a downloader is too haphazard in what they are grabbing, chances for disaster increase. Corrupted files, trackers going offline, no seeders for that half-downloaded television series, running out of room on hard drive storage for all those semi-downloaded things.

Socio-economic class, a ubiquitous top-down form of ordering individuals and communities, is a consideration in any P2P discussion. Surplus value is added to pirated products, explains Jonas Andersson (2006: 69) "through labour which...appears entirely unpaid: the late-night tinkering of crackers, encoders, subtitlers, administrators, seeders, leechers. This is a mode of labour which....thrives on mutual recognition, informal systems of meritocracy, and just plain, sheer fun and curiosity." As the "gift economy" underpinning digital file-sharing originated in the "rich West," Andersson continues, this peer labour "is dependent on already established prosperity; it is a form of ‘free’ labour which one can afford, given that one has got the required material setup as well as the time, skill, and intellectual capacities."Jonas Andersson, 'The Pirate Bay and the ethos of sharing,' published in Hadzi, Adnan et al. (2006) Deptford.TV Diaries, London: Openmute Publishing. Looking only at P2P from a Western perspective, the phenomonon doesn't seems to challenge well-established hierarchies of power.

However, using examples of non-digital sharing of cultural knowledge and artfacts from India (public holdings of seed patents) and Asia (the counterfeit economy), Andersson presents a broader look at the notion of "affordance" and its challenges to capitalism, from within capitalism, like P2P. The "collective gain" in copying of digital artefacts is such that even those people "with modest margins of sustenance can afford to share that which is only multiplied and never reducible: culture, ideas, knowledge, information, software" (ibid.). If we accept this argument, then it suggests that the old class orders themselves could be threatened by the constituent outcome of general processes of file-sharing, that "aggregated strategic entity — the network" (ibid.)

Our discussion started with the process of file-sharing in a cultural and social sense, the swapping of artefacts over networks. We then widened the definition of P2P to include the softwares and websites which enable this artefact exchange. Finally, we considered P2P in the broadest sense of a techno-social machine, an abstraction developed from the material roles and processes of exchange. Now it is time to pull back from this macro view to the micro level, the underlying computer code and communication protocols which are at the heart of peer to peer. A fascinating interplay between order and disorder exists even at this micro level.

Peer to peer software essentially operates upwards and outwards from individual internet-connected personal computers. The software creates a peer to peer computer network that "uses diverse connectivity between participants in a network and the cumulative [internet] bandwidth of network participants."Source: Wikipedia (find better definition from a book or paper) This P2P network represents a fundamentally different communications paradigm to traditional forms of electronic data exchange, in which a small number of centralised computer 'servers' transmit data to a relatively much larger number of distributed 'client' machines.

An example of the conventional client/server network in action would be a web designer using FTP software to upload an entire website from her work computer (client) to a specific location within a remote central bank of computers (server rack). The website is now permanently stored on the server, with its own unique web address (URL). This permanent address enables the website to be accessed by a large number of people from their own computers (clients). In visual terms, we can imagine a cone, with the server at the apex, and a ring of clients at the base. In this paradigm, the mute and obedient server is responsive to requests from chatty active clients.

This highly ordered set of relations does not make a scale-free network. On the contrary, the system is quite vulnerable. For example, if too many clients attempt to simultaneously access the server, they can cause it to crash. This limitation of the client/server relationship has been exploited by hacktivists via coordinated 'DOS' or 'Denial of Service' attacks since at least 1998, as a form of 'electronic civil disobedience' to highlight various social and political issues in the emerging public sphere of the internet.The Italian Strikenet, followed by EDT's Floodnet, are the first documented DOS actions.

In contrast, a P2P network is formed by the interconnections between 'peer nodes' that "simultaneously function as both 'clients' and 'servers' to the other nodes on the network" (Wikipedia, op. cit.). The structure is horizontal, heterarchical, and decentralised. An example of a P2P network in action are the various processes involved in file-sharing. A content ripper uploads a tiny tracker file to a tracker such as The Pirate Bay. This tracker points to the location of a specific digitised artefact seeded on the ripper's computer. Interested peers start downloading the artefact, packet by packet, to their own computers via a BitTorrent client (software).

As each peer receives a packet of data onto their own computer, this data is available to be automatically seeded to any other peer connected in the active download 'swarm' associated with that particular artefact.

Thus all downloaders become active or potential uploaders, as the artefact proliferates throughout the temporary P2P network which has formed around a desire for it.

Once all packets of the file has been downloaded onto a peer's computer, they can watch/listen to/read/play the artefact. Often peers make copies of the artefacts on other media, such as audio CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, or portable hard drives, in order to be able to further share the cultural material with friends, family and colleagues.

This offline recirculation of shared material has not really been researched, yet it is I suspect, highly significant aspect of the affective dimension of file-sharing.
>

If the peer is inclined, they will continue to share the file online for a period of time, at least until they have reached a ratio of 1.0 for that artefact.

*Context for this text

These are notes I prepared for an informal workshop presentation I gave at the First IT & Disorder workshop held at University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), in November 2008. The It & Disorder workshop was co-ordinated by Jonathon Marshall, a UTS post-doctoral fellow who is in the early stages of a 5 year project to investigate "the production of disorder in everyday life through Information and Communication Technology." As the project website states "Despite continual claims of increased efficiency, administration, when distributed through ICT, routinely seems out of control and unpredictable even to those expecting to hold power. Even good software can unexpectedly produce disorder. If this is a common experience, then it cannot be ignored or taken as unusual or as unimportant."

My presentation covered 3 topics - Fluxus, the early British punk phenomenon, and P2P, exploring them in terms of DIY and grass roots participatory cultural production. A second workshop was held in March 2009, in which I further explored P2P, mainly in terms of current legal and regulatory developments.

It's pretty much like pulling teeth, trying to rework these notes into an actual text. But now I am having fun getting diverted with histories of Baa Baa Black Sheep and other detours. This is where The Next layer can be fun - I can play with images, which is not much of an option with my 90,000 word thesis (okay, it will have some screen shots of software interfaces but that will probably be it - no woolly lambs, no sire-ee!)

I suppose my aim is to use my workshop ideas as the basis for Open Code & Open Culture, which will be the final chapter of my thesis.

Handshakes amongst strangers: P2P and the production of disorder within informational capitalism

doll_yoko — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:44:32 +0000

English

This is an attached slide-show (with notes)* from my presentation at The Second IT & Disorder Workshop held at the University of Technology, Sydney, on 26 March 2009. I need to work this up into a paper for publication in a uni e-journal very very soon! But I seem to be more devoted to d/l'ing endless stuff 'for research' from my favourite sites.... Anyway this presentation went well, and I felt i had redeemed myself after 2 really embarrassing presentations late last year. i think it's pretty hard to give workshop and conference talks whilst in the middle of writing your thesis - it takes a different part of mind to convert all this loose tangle of theory and case studies into something palatable for a live right in front of you audience. But after 2 humiliations I was determined not to make a hat trick.

The slide show was created in OpenOffice3.0, and saved in the open document presentation format. Open Office does give an option to save in Micro$oft's PowerPoint format also, but I chose not to use it. One handy feature is the ability to export your slideshow in PDF format - this means that basically any foreign computer you might land on at a public presentation will be able to display your show (obviously u can't have transitions between the pages when you show it as a PDF, but this is not so important). I don't know if MS can open .odp files (because i don't have it on any of my machines), but the last time i checked it cdn't even open OpenOffice's native format for text documents - .odt files, which is very lame. In 2005 I wrote my master's thesis using OO.Grazing the Digital Commons: artist-made softwares, politicised technologies and the creation of new generative realms can be downloaded from here. The file is 17Mb as it contains many images. It was about 55,000 words, half of which were end notes (i was thinking of the end notes as a form of hypertext and had more fun writing them than i did the thesis body), and I found that OO was very robust and could handle basically everything i wanted it to do. That's why i haven't been arsed to install MS Word - who needs it!

Okay, the only thing that OO isn't great for right now for me is interfacing seamlessly with Dragon Naturally Speaking voice-text software. Dragon is an awesome software, and I wish I had discovered it much much earlier during my PhD research as i am a crap typist. Anyway, perhaps it was developed originally for military/spying purposes, because it is so powerful - you just speak/read at normal speed and it converts your words into digital print before your eyes. It is for PC platform only but the makers have sold the engine to Mac peeps and there is a mac equivalent now available. I wonder if there is something similar for Linux? the software aint cheap (in oz i think it costs about $900) but luckily for me a Mac friend of mine had mistakenly bought it from idiot sales peeps, and as it was useless for her mac, gifted it to me. I use it with OpenOffice, but it is slightly clunky and OO does not recognise all of the voice commands. It would be really great if an OO developer wrote some kind of patch and mebbe this will happen in time. Anyway, I still use it and just cludge my way around the cludges.

The messy Hydra: developments in transglobal Peer-to-Peer culture

doll_yoko — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:40:42 +0000

Once a minor practice in places of privilege in the global North, internet-enabled file-sharing via peer-to-peer (P2P) systems has evolved into a vast, transglobal activity. Engaging millions of participants, P2P is decentralised, deeply networked, grass roots-driven, polycultural phenomenon growing exponentially. It appears uncontainable, as each wave of technological, legal and commercial measures designed to halt or divert it fail. Moreover, pressure exerted 'from above' by governments and multinational industry alliances becomes a productive force within geographically dispersed, globalised P2P networks and communities. Technical and social innovations are generated 'from below' in order to protect and expand “cultures of sharing,” or “piracy.” Paradoxically, these innovations become mainstreamed as they force corporations to adopt new business models in response to 'market' desires.

This generative power of P2P to produce new techno-social relations, both within its own deterrorialised field and within corporate/sovereign regimes of power, has received little critical analysis. My paper [yet to be written!] focuses on recent developments and their implications, by surveying technical news aggregators, discussion fora, mass media reportage, government position papers, and intergovernmental treaties. 2009 has been a watershed year, with controversial legislation proposed, passed, or rejected, in Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia—plus the trial of a major P2P facilitating entity, The Pirate Bay. This highly contested area is expanding its staging grounds, drawing in new players like Internet Service Providers.

Conflicts of cultural enclosure through copyright regimes, and re-appropriation through digital liberation methods, create a resistant, messy techno-social hydra. This anarchic monster is both a child of the internet's past, and potentially a parent of its future.

caption: image from http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/hydra-70.htm

Music for writing

doll_yoko — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 06:56:11 +0000

Writuals for Writing:

scents, sounds, objects - to help get into the zone

#1 music

usually play one album all day
sometimes play a second or third even by the same composer or artist
this week i am obsessively playing the following:

- Angelo Badalamenti Soundtracks
------- Twin Peaks (1990)
------- Mulholland Drive (1996)

- Anour Braham Trio

- The Idan Raichel Project - Within My Walls
- The Idan Raichel Project - The Idan Raichel Project
- The Idan Raichel Project - Exclusive Downloads

- Fennesz - Black Sea

- Harold Budd - Avalon Sutra
- Harold Budd, Ruben Garcia, Daniel Lentz (1993 ) - Music For 3 Pianos
- Harold Budd & John Fox - Transclucent Drift Music

Mikis Theodorakis - Mikres Kiklades - songcycle

- Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - The Proposition (2005)
- Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

- silvio rodriguez
------- Dias y Flores (1975)
- ------ Te Doy Una Cancion (1975)

- Sugar Minott - Sweeter Than Sugar (1980)
- Sugar Minott - Sufferers' Choice
- Sugar Minott - Ghetto-ology + Dub
- Sugar Minott - Black Roots

#2 scents

- Nag Champa incense
- oil blends from Goulds Homeopathic Pharmacy in Hobart (they do mail order) - their "study blend" is a mix of rosemary, grapefruit, bergamot, peppermint & basil

#3 visuals

- flowers by the computer - today it is wild flowers, and small rosebuds, and geranium

#4 mindless entertainment at lunchtime

this week it is Dollhouse (dumb baby show-but useful not to watch anything really engaging at lunchtime to resist temptation to take rest of the afternoon off)

#5 escapist entertainment when i knock off

the past 2 weeks it has been Season 2 of Terminator - the Sarah Connor Chronicles
i am devastated the series has finished, and probably won't be renewed
am d/ling the Terminator Trilogy as a small comfort