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# 2022-03-25 - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz | |
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want | |
to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and | |
cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is | |
increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private | |
corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous | |
results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to | |
publishers like Reed Elsevier. | |
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement | |
has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their | |
copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the | |
Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under | |
the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in | |
the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. | |
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to | |
read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but | |
only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific | |
articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not | |
to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. | |
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the | |
copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for | |
access, and it's perfectly legal--there's nothing we can do to stop | |
them." But there is something we can, something that's already being | |
done: we can fight back. | |
Those with access to these resources--students, librarians, | |
scientists--you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this | |
banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But | |
you need not--indeed, morally, you cannot--keep this privilege for | |
yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you | |
have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests | |
for friends. | |
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. | |
You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, | |
liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing | |
them with your friends. | |
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's | |
called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were | |
the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. | |
But sharing isn't immoral--it's a moral imperative. Only those | |
blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. | |
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under | |
which they operate require it--their shareholders would revolt at | |
anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, | |
passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make | |
copies. | |
There is no justice in following unjust laws. 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. | |
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. We need to fight for Guerilla | |
Open Access. | |
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong | |
message opposing the privatization of knowledge--we'll make it a | |
thing of the past. Will you join us? | |
Aaron Swartz | |
July 2008, Eremo, Italy | |
Original source | |
tags: article,manifesto,philosophy | |
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