# Politicizing piracy - making an unconditional demand

**keywords**: decommodification, articulation/formalisation, disobedience, greyzone, tactical use of technology

## NOTES

- what's politicizing? creating a radical (unconditional) demand/principle, from which consequences follow
- it's not utopian as "look, how beautiful it is/will be"
- not a response to a given problem
- changing terms of the debate --> strong articulation/formalisation
- proposing a formalization and shifting of a terrain of struggle
- negation of certain position. principle: property needs to go.
- some conditions of access are enforced through technological means and some through legal risks. it is different in different parts of the world. some will get in legal trouble because of the sharing some will not but they will primarily struggle with technological means (they need VPN, or tools to fight the paywalls)
- how to deal with mediations, conditional proposals for some "middle way"

- what's piracy? principle of abolition of property, property-form instituted in law, control and commodification, exclusion of/from communal wealth

- digital networks have transformed from means of communication to global economic infrastructure and reallocation of wealth, yet the politics of counter-power have become cornered into issues of surveillance and control, with the counter-surveillance and leaking -- a capacity reserved for a small number of savvy hacker figures -- becoming the privileged form of political action
- piracy points to a legacy of mass politics of redistributio

## Topic:

### Politicising Piracy
https://hackmd.io/juYB21NwSFOqpeOPHNh_MA?edit

## Sessions:

### Photocopying
https://hackmd.io/4rnp1a9lSTeV4AaYonUlPQ?edit

- organizing technical principle: (paper) copymachine
- organizing social principle:
- group of legal scholar activists
- students needing textbooks and other materials to study
- politicizing/interventions:
- court case

- hands on:
- copying on a xerox machine

### Download/upload
pad: https://hackmd.io/C_NWuOFDQtan82lm-0DLvA?edit

- organizing technical principle: download/upload
- organizing social principle:
- libgen: popular web/bulletin-board forum
- aaaaarg: organizing knowledge structure via custom web app
- motw: dedicated amateur librarian community (calibre>accorder)
- politicizing/interventions:
- custodians.online letter
- aaaaarg court case (crowd funding)
- aaaaarg verso letter

- hands-on:
- download/upload libgen
- download/upload + creating/maintaining aaaaarg collections
- download/upload + motw librarian workflow

### P2P / The Pirate Bay
pad: https://hackmd.io/CadRZL_ITT2CMKlacHQHTA?edit

This session revisits the rise (and fall) of The Pirate Bay, started as part of an attempt by activists to politicize and popularize file-sharing in a playful way. Within some years, The Pirate Bay had grown to an infrastructural node that initiated a large part of global internet traffic, and had become THE symbol for resistance against copyright – which was not exactly the intention.

- Background: early 2000's P2P
- politicizing/interventions:
- launch of piraten buro
- ? http://www.rolux.org/texts/napster_was_only_the_beginning/
- the pirate bay fuck-off letters
- buying sealand
- oscartorrents?

- organizing technical principle: P2P shared/distributed network resources
- organizing social principle:
- avantgard dedicated playful group
- mass of passionate avid movie&music lovers/collectors
- political (pirate) party (liberal politicization, focusing on individual rights)

- further interventions:
- (related to the politics of prescription)
- not settling for copyright reform
- declaring the debate for/against file-sharing to be over

- hands-on:
- torrent trackers + download
- private trackers (karagarga, bibliotik.me)
- ? popcorn
- ? webtorrents

### Blackboxing/proxying/obfuscation
https://hackmd.io/xgrL4qOBQ2q-KgAskjBUgg

- organizing technical principle: blackboxing/proxying
- organizing social principle:
- a competent technologist developing the platform (with possible secret group allowing for the access credentials by giving them or just cracking the servers/databases)
- massive scientific community sharing academic articles

- politicizing/interventions:
- lecture: Why Science is better with Communism? The case of Sci-Hub.
- interviews, presentations, vk.com/blog statements

- hands on:
- search (via doi), download articles

## What we feel it should get in..

- Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
- Pirate cinema/0xDB/OpenMediaLibrary: with Sebastian's interventions
- Lawrence Liang: Rameshwari case
-

- case: pirate.cinema/textz.com, intervention: statements by p.c, hands-on: 0xDB

- case: ebook.farm, (explained through planka.nu and its book: Transport Power System, hands-on: mutualising risk)

Strategies sessions:

Outro session: for a politics of resources, not a politics of control

Some session could work in pairs. One would be the practice as a case study and another iconic intervention coming from that practice. The list of those kind of sessions: the pirate bay, sci-hub, ebook.farm/planka.nu, pirate.cinema/0xdb, ubu.com, custodians.online/motw.

### Session: Sci-Hub (Alexandra Elbakyan)

document: https://hackmd.io/@marcell/sci-hub/edit

### Session: Lib-Gen

document: https://hackmd.io/@tomislavmedak/lib-gen/edit

### Session: Planka.nu

case: planka.nu, intervention: Traffic Power System, hands-on: mutualising risks

###

## REFERENCES:

Peter Hallward: The Politics of Prescription

Rolux, "An Open Letter to Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Regarding His 'Intellectual Property' (2004) https://rolux.org/texts/free_adorno_free_benjamin/

## INTERVENTIONS:

* Bureau for Piracy:
* Custodians.online
* Alexandra Elbakyan
* Pirate.Cinema
* Ubu.com
* Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Acces Manifesto