Post Aljl8yiSdHaZ8OBepU by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
 (DIR) More posts by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
 (DIR) Post #AljKNxzKvJ4OSU0FE0 by tb@tldr.nettime.org
       2024-09-06T14:48:29Z
       
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       A friend asked the hivemind, basically, how do you deal with the fact that, at a university level, assigned readings are expensive / scarce, and that they’re available by other means. My answer:/// The genteel name for these resources – IOW, the way to avoid using words like “piracy” — is *shadow libraries*. In and of themselves, they’re a legit subject of academic research, but they’re difficult to study because the precise nature of one’s interaction with them can stray very close to the line between fundable research and massive civil or even criminal activity. Doubly so because in academic contexts the *means* of interacting with them, i.e., the internet, is effectively run by IT departments, which are typically more closely aligned with general counsels’ offices than with faculties, so their role is ambiguous and often — due to federal law — involved in enforcement of intellectual property. Put plainly, if you sit in your office downloading books from Library Genesis or papers from Sci-Hub, sooner or later you’ll get a talking-to or worse. That’s in the context if WEIRD nations (you know, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracies), though; in LDCs, the issues are different, centering more on equity and A2K (access to knowledge) than IP…. /// [1/2]
       
 (DIR) Post #AljKNzQfZAWmvXnaT2 by tb@tldr.nettime.org
       2024-09-06T14:48:54Z
       
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       [2/2] …Some of my academic besties have done serious work on SLs: Joe Karaganis edited a book (Open Access, BTW) for MIT Press that was the culmination of a comparative longitudinal and historical studies across several countries — Germany, Russia, Brazil, India, and (crucially for you) South Africa, that I remember. And note *historical*: much of the book is concerned with ths pre-internet origins of informal libraries (samizdat, photocopies, etc), and the broad arguments or at least implications are that the IPR regimes of WEIRD nations are an extension of colonial practices, and that we need to understand SLs as *continuous* with unofficial means of circulation. So: if you think of your syllabus as a document that’s purely ‘internal’ to a course / dept / school, then telling students how to access works by legally questionable means is problematic; whereas if you think of it as a document that also has an ‘external’ function — for example, to an international scholarly community presented with other standards and legal aspects, then there’s a stronger equity-based argument for including explicit pointers to SLs. That all sounds very elaborate, but it can be distilled to a short paragraph that (1) is a genuine “teachable moment,” and (2) acknowledges the fact that many scholars around the world be unable to engage with your syllabus were it not for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, etc. A pointer to Joe’s book _Shadow Libraries_ both supports that and enables students and others to understand why these questions aren’t reducible to the usual pearl-clutching blather of WEIRD privilege. ///
       
 (DIR) Post #AljKO0AknpOJETMOIa by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
       2024-09-06T15:01:55Z
       
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       @tb WEIRD nations (you know, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracies),Is that your coinage? It's a good one! In software, you'd call the mechanism a "cache"; the machine has gone through some effort to find remote data, it is stored locally for delivery to the user, and a mostly anonymous copy is stored within the machine, usually for a limited about of time, in case another user requests the same data; the buffer cache saved all the effort to fetch the remote data. The analogy is very strong here.
       
 (DIR) Post #AljLeUWznUTTyZBrXM by tb@tldr.nettime.org
       2024-09-06T15:16:06Z
       
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       @tomjennings Not me, it’s been floating around for years, maybe decades now. You're 💯 right about the caching analogy, but it’s more than just an analogy — or, rather, we reached the point decades ago where the fluidity of programming meant we could start to turn ~metaphors into machines: BitTorrent and other distributed protocols built almost entirely around, basically, caching.
       
 (DIR) Post #AljMNGrBU84eb3zBPU by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
       2024-09-06T15:24:13Z
       
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       @tb Maybe there's a legal approach to "it's not stealing it's a short term cache". Or we can just fkn steal from the thieves and stop arguing with them.
       
 (DIR) Post #AljPjRO3JYsvUMcfRY by tb@tldr.nettime.org
       2024-09-06T16:01:49Z
       
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       @tomjennings I dimly remember some techy experiment using DNS as a protocol for distributing something or other that wasn’t DNS — breaking files up into segments in the TXT record?
       
 (DIR) Post #Aljl8yiSdHaZ8OBepU by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
       2024-09-06T20:00:20Z
       
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       @tb Though the "cache" idea regarding corporate media is just a revisit of 80s? home video taping of television. The argument was that it is merely time-shifting viewing, delayed in time. Hmm that might be a good approach still. But wtf do I know.