67 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
67 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it
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for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published
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over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked
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up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the
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most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to
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publishers like Reed Elsevier.
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There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
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valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but
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instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow
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anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only
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apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been
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lost.
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That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work
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of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at
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Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite
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universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's
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outrageous and unacceptable.
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"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights,
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they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly
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legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can,
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something that's already being done: we can fight back.
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Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you
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have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while
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the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you
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cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with
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the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download
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requests for friends.
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Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have
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been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information
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locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
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But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called
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stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral
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equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't
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immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to
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let a friend make a copy.
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Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they
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operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the
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politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the
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exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
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There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light
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and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to
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this private theft of public culture.
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We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share
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them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to
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the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to
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download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need
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to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
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With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message
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opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past.
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Will you join us?
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Aaron Swartz
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July 2008, Eremo, Italy
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