Interfacing the law (2018)

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For the first iteration of this project, see: Interfacing the law (2017)

Interfacing the law

Pirate libraries, shadow libraries, piratical text collections, amateur digital libraries, peer produced libraries and how to read them together.

Independent Voices, an Open Access Collection of an Alternative Press: only some titles are publicly available and others (until December 2018) exclusively through funding libraries
Monoskop Reader cross-indexes multiple volumes of text with the help of tf–idf
Robert M. Ochshorn Looseleaf interface for pdf's, also available on aaaaarg
https://0xdb.org/ allows users to search through metadata, stills and subtitles of 14,522 films, many of them copyrighted
Digitised version of Herman's%20Library, books that Black Panther activist Herman Wallace collected in his prison cell
Mute Radical Publishing archive: an experiment with collective bibliographies
Richard Wright, Knowledge Migration (2016) “Using a 200K sample taken from the British Library's print catalogue, this animation plots each item's place and date of publication (or date of acquisition where available) since the library's foundation in 1753.”
Geographical distribution of downloads from site “b”. Balázs Bodó, 2016

How can the right to access to knowledge be held up against claims of copyright? How can we battle the terror of the mind produced by the current intellectual property regime? Interfacing the law is an attempt to build a series of platforms, both in the sense of on-line interfaces and of public discourse, that allow us to experiment with, to openly discuss and to reflect on reading together while the next wave of court cases is waiting to happen[1]. It is urgent that we find ways to make the public debate transcend the juridical binary of illegal vs. legal, and claim political legitimacy for acting out the potential of digital publishing, and the possibility of sharing and reading digital books.

With reading and publishing increasingly turning digital, libraries are struggling to maintain their exceptional role as public access-providers to knowledge. There are few technical limitations that prevent anyone access to books from anywhere, but the legal reality for lending and borrowing digital texts is complicated.

Shadowlibraries such as Monoskop, aaaaarg, Sci-hub, Libgen and various onion-sites operate in this gap, not incidentally often at the margins of the rich academic institutions of the West. They collect and distribute electronic texts freely, serving readers materials that otherwise would not be affordable or accessible. In addition, many of these initiatives propose carefully maintained collections and selections that make a difference to what is generally available via mainstream platforms.

Pirate libraries are the products of readers (and sometimes authors), academics and laypeople, all sharing a deep passion for the book, operating in a zone where there is little to no obstacle to the development of the “ideal” library. As such, pirate libraries can teach important lessons on what is expected of a library, how book consumption habits evolve, and how knowledge flows around the globe.[2]

Readers outside institutions as well as university researchers have come to rely on shadowlibraries but no matter how critical these resources have become, it is still hard to speak out for them publicly. The recent court case of Elsevier vs. Sci-hub and Libgen[3] and another one underway against aaaarg[4] show the vulnerability of such parallel digital knowledge infrastructures that sometimes have been around for decades. While each of them takes a different political stance, in the end of the day their various forms of civil disobedience count only as illegal action.

One of the problems that we have when we try to understand piracy is that it often does not fit within any of these existing categories, and there is a positivity or excess in the body of the pirate that cannot be disavowed.[5]

The Open Access and Free Culture movements for example, deploy the little space available in current intellectual property law in an attempt to reform intellectual property frameworks. The fierce industry that has grown around intellectual property, but also the dependency of the discourse on classical terms of representation, limit the available space to question what kinds of access should be available to whom, how individual authorship is framing social and cultural conditions, and how knowledge and property are being conflated in the current legal regime. These questions seem to regain importance in times of austerity and the privatisation of education, but also when we attempt to confront the colonial patterns in knowledge production and distribution.

Viewed through a proprietary lens, an author's intellectual expression is an object that is owned like any other. In the context of a market economy, it is simply a commodity to be exchanged and exploited in the marketplace. Nonetheless, the language of “ownership,” “property,” and “commodity” obfuscates the nature of copyright's subject matter, and cloaks the social and cultural conditions of its production and the implications of its protection.[6]

Biblioleak, extra-legal publishing, bibliothèque sauvage, shadow library, piratical text collection, popular resource sharing method, peer-acy, amateur digital library, bibliogifting, uneasy sharing, peer produced library ... if only judged by the many euphemisms, it is clear that there exists a vibrant extra-legal practice of rethinking the terms of property, authorship and practices of knowledge distribution in the age of the digital library. Always paradoxical or even incoherent, these practices can take the form of explicit political projects (see sample projects), or relate to the set of choices any individual makes on a daily basis: what (not) to download, share and distribute; what to consider normal, brave, necessary or too risky. Interfacing each in their own way with legal and political frameworks, we could consider those multi-scale practices as experiments with the social contracts that link libraries, librarians, readers and books.

This is why projects like aaaaarg, ubu, monoskop and the others are so crucial at the moment because they point to a different future, different not only from today's monopolies but also from tomorrows.[7]

In collaboration with librarians, lawyers, activists and archivists, we invite you to design or redesign on-line or software interfaces to extra-legal collections of digital texts. Exploring the contents of massive text-collections available in pirate, shadow, extra-legal and amateur digital libraries, we will experiment with ways to read, index and maintain a digital library together.

When everyone is librarian, library is everywhere.[8]

Interfacing the law is developed by Constant in collaboration with Memory of the World.

Brief

For the sixth Special Issue, we will develop on on-line or software interfaces to a collection of extra-legal documents. It means we will make catalogs rather than publications.

These “interfaces” can take the form of a collective annotation system, digital document analyses, portable bibliothèque sauvage, re-publication of digital content, library tool, mirrored server, on-line catalog ...

We might decide to mirror one or more existing collections (see: sample collections) or curate our own. This project is first of all concerned with the problematics of how we interface with digital libraries but that does not mean the collections need to be confined to “books”.

Who has access (who can upload? who can download?), the political positioning of the project (how does it place itself in relation to legality and legitimacy?), the formats and types of content hosted (what is included and excluded? for who is this collection? how and under what conditions were these files made?), where will the collection be stored (who hosts, where, under what conditions?), privacy and security ... and, of course, the law.

Sample libraries

Reading

Video + film fragments

  • Brian Knappenberger, The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) "follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz (...) a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties." https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz
  • Cornelia Sollfrank, Giving What You Don't Have (2012-2015) "I realised how limited the discourse on appropriation is and shifted the question from what artists can TAKE, to the question of what artists can GIVE, in the sense of what they can contribute to the free circulation of art and culture." http://artwarez.org/projects/GWYDH/ (interview with Andrea Francke, Eva Weinmayr, Piracy Project)
  • Welcome to the scene, Episode 01 (2004) "They are revered, reviled, hunted and admired. No one knows who they are - at least, not as far as they know." http://www.welcometothescene.com/
  • Jamie King, Steal this film II (2007) "If Steal this film II proves at all useful in bringing new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think 'after intellectual property', think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity, we have achieved our main goal." http://footage.stealthisfilm.com/browse (interview with Lawrence Liang)
  • Simon Klose, TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (2013) "How did Tiamo, a beer crazy hardware fanatic, Brokep a tree hugging eco activist and Anakata, a paranoid cyber libertarian, get the White House to threaten the Swedish government with trade sanctions?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8

Programme

Biographies

Dusan Barok

Dušan Barok is a researcher, writer and artist based in Amsterdam. He is founding editor of Monoskop and currently a research fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam focusing on the documentation of time-based art. Born in Bratislava, he graduated in information technologies from the University of Economics, Bratislava (DI, 1997-2002), and Networked Media from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (MDes, 2010-12). In 2012 he has co-founded the artist collective La Société Anonyme known for its work The SKOR Codex. In collaboration with Bergen Center for Electronic Arts he organised and moderated the series of seminars on media aesthetics The Extensions of Many in the spring of 2015. In the autumn of 2015 he organised and convened a symposium entitled Ideographies of Knowledge in collaboration with Barbora Šedivá.

Varinia Canto Vila

Varinia Canto Vila (Santiago de Chile, 1976) graduated as a dancer from the Conservatory of Arts - Universidad de Chile and from P.A.R.T.S in 1999. In 2014, she graduated from Goldsmiths University where she undertook an MA in Art & Politics. She has mainly worked as a dancer-performer for Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods in Highway 101 (1999) and Violet (2011); for Lilia Mestre in Unnoticed, for Rachid Ouramdane, Claire Croizé, Marcos Simoes, Metter Edvardsen, and Thomas Steyaert and Raul Maia.

In her recent work Cartographers, Varinia Canto Vila sees laws and norms as a matrix that creates divisions and borders – physical and existential – Rhis work attempts to map a territory through choreography. In this legal territory, gesture and movement become the cartographers, making visible how the legal and the normative are preset frames for our paths.

André Castro

André Castro is a media artist, with a background in sound art and experimental music. His recent practice deals with digital publications, offline digital libraries (bibliotecha.info), MIDI songs, and chatbots.

André is a 2013 alumnus of the MMDC program and has previously studied under the Sonic Arts MA at Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts (Middlesex University, UK).

Currently André is a tutor at the Piet Zwart Institute.

http://oooooooooo.io

Séverine Dusollier

Séverine Dusollier is Doctor in Law of the University of Namur (Belgium). Before joining the SciencesPo faculty, she was a Professor in the University of Namur, where she taught intellectual property, IT law, property, competition law and media law. She was the Director of the CRIDS (Research Centre in Information, Law and Society), gathering more than 40 researchers engaged in a wide area of technology-related issues, from sociology, philosophy, communication to law and economy. As a researcher at CRIDS from 1996, she has carried out research in several European and national projects, namely for the Belgian Government, WIPO, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the European Commission and Parliament.

Her current research relates to intellectual property, copyright and mainly on IP limitations, the public domain and the commons. She is particularly interested in the deviations of the traditional IP models, such as the shift from exclusivity to its subversion or dilution, or the transformation of the unique and self-contained authorship to connected multiple authors.

Séverine Dusollier got awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant (2014-2019) on the topic of inclusive rights in property and intellectual property.

Lawrence Liang

Lawrence Liang is a legal researcher and lawyer based in the city of Bangalore, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a co founder of the Alternative Law Forum, and by 2006 had emerged as a spokesperson against the politics of "intellectual property". His family is of Chinese origin but settled down in Kolkata many years ago.

Liang's key areas of interest are law, popular culture and piracy. He has been working closely with Sarai, New Delhi on a joint research project Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons. Liang is a "keen follower of the open source movement in software", Lawrence Liang has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain. Segments of an interview with Liang commenting extensively on copyright and culture are featured in Steal This Film (Two).

Liang is author of "Sex, laws and Videotape: The Public is watching" and "Guide to open content licenses," published by the Piet Zwart Institute in 2004.

Aymeric Mansoux

Aymeric Mansoux research deals with the defining, constraining and confining of cultural freedom in the context of network based practices. His past and current collaborations spawn across the creation of festivals and conferences (Le Placard, make art, FREE?!), music and sound works (0xA, Raid Over Moscow, stmsq1), installations (Go Forth & *, Hello Process, Meshy), software (Puredyne GNU/Linux) as well as collectives and communities (GOTO10, La Société Anonyme, 80c), books (FLOSS+Art, Elastic Versailles) and all sorts of workshops related to media, net, generative, software art and culture.

His latest collaborations are Naked on Pluto (VIDA award [ES]), with Marloes de Valk and Dave Griffiths, a project that aims at unfolding the issues of software mediation in the context of privacy and communication within a proprietary and commercial social network such as Facebook; and The SKOR Codex (Japan Media Arts Festival award [JP]), with La Société Anonyme, a limited edition of eight hand bound books of raw data dumps that mimic NASA’s Golden Disc Record, aiming at documenting the life at a Dutch institution before it ceased to exists with the 2012 Dutch art funding cuts.

He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London [UK] under supervision of Prof. Matthew Fuller, researching on the creative misunderstandings between art, politics and the law within free culture. He regularly publishes essays and papers linked to his ongoing research: http://bleu255.com

Marcell Mars

Marcell is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute - mi2 and net.culture club mama in Zagreb. He initiated GNU GPL publishing label ' EGOBOO.bits, TamTam platform for on-line collaboration, Ngode software for NGOs financial management.

He initiated skill sharing regular informal meetings of enthusiasts in mama + started skill sharing's satellites g33koskop and 'The Fair of Mean Equipment'.

Marcell participated in collaborative artistic projects like NRD Kit of NRD Van group of artists, gifoskop (interactive animation) together with Nikolina Pristas & Maja Marjancic + was a tech developer for projects EditThisBanner (by Lina Kovacevic) and Flying Carpet (by Lala Rascic).

He was one of the organizers of summer camps "Otokultivator" on island Vis (together with URK Močvara & EASA Croatia) and SummerSource (together with TacticalTech).

Marcell participated in curating or producing mi2 yearly exhibitions I Am Still Alive (2001) and re:Con (2002), free culture, science and technology festival Freedom to creativity! (2005) and in conceptual exhibition System.hack() (2006). He is a member of Creative Commons Team Croatia.

Regularly runs workshops like 'Programming for non-programmers', 'Social software and semantic web in practice', 'Command line audio on GNU/Linux'... Gives talks on topics like hacking, free software philosophy, gathering communities around good causes, slacking, doing nothing, stupid/smart business models of music industries, social software & semantic web...

While in Zagreb Marcell hangs out in Hacklab in mama, in Belgrade runs Wonder of technology/Čudo tehnike, Hackers lenses/Hakerska optika and Programming for non-programmers at Faculty of Media and Communication, from 2011-2012 worked on research Ruling Class Studies at Jan Van Eyck in Maastricht, a research continued in 2015 as PhD at Digital Cultures Research Lab. In 2013 did fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. These days he advocates for and works on Public library.

He sings, dances, tells stories and makes music as Nenad Romic za Novyi Byte.

Michael Murtaugh

Michael Murtaugh completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (’94). Subsequently he was part of the Interactive Cinema group, led by Glorianna Davenport at the MIT Media Lab where he completed a masters degree (’96). His research focus was on building tools for “Evolving Documentaries”, or how traditional film/video model evolves in the context of digital networked media such as the Web.

Currently Michael teaches in the Master Media Design and Communication programme at the Piet Zwart Institute. He is a member of Constant, a Brussels based collective engaged in the fields of free and open source software, feminism, copyright alternatives, and collaborative networks. With Constant he is currently working on Active Archives, a platform for diverse material ranging from texts to images and video. Seeing the project as both technical and cultural, the system facilitates, re-use of material while enriching content through metadata, vocabularies, and taxonomies. Next to these activities, Murtaugh is the founder of automatist.org, a new media design firm specialised in community databases, interactive documentary, and tools for new forms of reading and writing online.

http://automatist.org/

Dubravka Sekulic

Dubravka Sekulic is an architect and researcher focusing on the topics of transformation of public domain in the contemporary cities, commons and spatial justice, and spatial implications of neoliberal planning. Her book "Glotzt nicht so Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade" was published in 2012, by Jan van Eyck Academie. Together with Žiga Testen, and Gal Kirn she co-edited the book “Surfing the Black” about Yugoslav black wave cinema published by Jan van Eyck in Spring 2012.

In 2012, together with Andrej Dolinka and Katarina Krsti? she curated a show “Three points of support: Zoran Bojovi?” at Museum of Contemporary Arts in Belgrade, with the focus on African and Middle Eastern projects of Bojovic and their relation to Non-aligned Movement. Together with Branko Belacevic, Jelena Stefanovic, Marko Miletic and Srcan Prodanovic she authored exhibition and book “Peti park - Struggle for Everyday” about the struggle of a community for a park in Belgrade.

She is working on a book “Planning for the Unexpected – Sourcebook for Urban Struggle” based on the experiences of regional Right to the City initiatives, for which she was awarded artistic research grant by Royal Art Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.

Dubravka exhibited and lectured about her work across the globe, including at aut.innsbruck (at), Stroom, the Hague (nl), Superfront, Los Angeles (USA), AA, London (UK). She graduated architecture at Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, where she was a lecturer. She was an East European Exchange Network fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany and a design researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Femke Snelting

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software. She works with and for Constant, a Brussels-based association for arts and media that generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational experiments in local and international contexts.

With Constant, she co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and the Libre Graphics Research Unit to investigate the way digital tools and creative practice might co-construct each other.

With Jara Rocha, she currently develops Possible Bodies, an ongoing collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that "bodies" are. Through inventories, performative experiments and texts they ask what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present, especially in contact with the technologies, infrastructures, and techniques of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning.

She collaborated with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring as De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research), employing a variety of tactics to explore female identity, narratives of the archive and media image ecologies.

In 2015 Femke was an Art, Science and Business fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude and currently she teaches at The Piet Zwart Institute (Media Design: experimental publishing, Rotterdam) and a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels).

http://snelting.domainepublic.net/

Notes + traces

Documentation

Projects

Pad Paradise

Git hell

References

  1. ↑ Ref court cases
  2. ↑ Balázs Bodó, Libraries in the post-scarcity era (2015)
  3. ↑ https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-tears-down-academias-illegal-copyright-paywalls-150627/
  4. ↑ https://www.gofundme.com/aaaaarg
  5. ↑ Lawrence Liang, Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate (2011)
  6. ↑ Carys J. Craig, Joseph F. Turcotte, Rosemary J. Coombe, What's Feminist about Open Access? A relational approach to copyright in the academy (2011)
  7. ↑ Felix Stalder, Nettime (2016)
  8. ↑ Memory of the World, End-to-end-catalog

This page (?) is copyleft Constant (?) 2017, available under a Free Art Licence http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

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