User:Pedro Sá Couto/Graduate Research Seminar Trim 5/Introduction 05032020

From the XPUB PAD
https://pad.xpub.nl/p/psc_intro_01_02

INTRODUCTION

I am a privileged student. I have always been part of universities where I had access to centralised academic journals. The reality in academic publishing nowadays is universities and governments outsourcing the publishing of research papers to private companies such as JSTOR and Elsevier. These journals are maintained within paywalls that demand payment of approximately 30 euro per article, making access practically impossible to anyone who is outside institutions that have a subscription. Strategies such as watermarking are reinforced by these companies to discourage the distribution of proprietary material, making users more liable for their actions. Book publishers reinforce similar strategies, where customers are not able to share files they have paid for. My research departs from the critical question — how can publishing bypass surveillance? In this thesis, I will focus on how digital surveillance influences the access to published material and the motivations behind the creation of reactive measures against closed access publishing.

In my first chapter, I will address how printed media played a vital role to bypass censorship from oppressive regimes. At this moment, the mainstream usage of the internet enables the propagation of files and political ideas to get viral within bigger audiences. A wide variety of infrastructures exist to publish files that have been made exclusive for a broad diversity of reasons. From protected governmental secrets, until copyrighted material. Digital online archives and libraries started to provide a space to access media that come from alternative channels. I will question what is the current impact of these online spaces and their positions while preserving the digital memory of sensitive information.

During the second chapter, I will focus on how commercial distribution channels appropriated specific techniques from libraries and archives as a way to create accountability for users who illegally download, distribute and make available copyrighted material. I explore the outcomes of strategies of online censorship within the contemporary panorama of digital surveillance and delve into the strategies reinforced. Publishers started to limit access to illegal copies, by appending imprints like the user geolocation, IP addresses, mac addresses, email addresses, and others. What are the impacts of constantly reminding readers they can become targets?

The third chapter focuses on my project Tactical Watermarks. Tactical Watermarks delves on the use of watermarks as alternative forms of anonymisation, questioning authorship, protecting users' identity and appending evidence of the hidden processes required to subvert surveillance in physical and digital media. As a publisher, I always had as my most significant concern how archives are documented and how provenance is displayed. Transposing from physical or digital media is a process where information gets lost very often. Physical properties are hard to translate when it comes to its transformation into a digital file and vice-versa. What traces are left behind that make the ones who download and share accountable? How are these imprints broadcasted and what kind of information can be spotted? How can they be reappropriated?