"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."
- Aaron Swartz
Swartz was invoking the
grand tradition of civil disobedience in order to counter the challenge of
technocapitalism which is claiming its ownership over knowledge and creativity
produced and cumulated from innumerable nodes of being. He was not just
proposing and advocating a resistance but was actually performing it: in his
own terms, he was "liberating the information (that had been) locked up" (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, July
2008).
Locking up the knowledge
into secured archives with special privileged access is an enterprise
generating huge profit: confreres of technocapitalism are gearing up with
immense interest to tap it as much as they can by bringing up technological as
well as legal barricades. As Swartz had identified, "The world's entire scientific
and cultural heritage ... is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful
of private corporations" (Manifesto).
It is a worldwide phenomenon, one being recently reported from India as well.
Three publishers- Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and
Routledge had sued a petty photocopy shop and the Ratan Tata Library under
Delhi University for issuing course packs for its students. Course packs are
the sets of photocopied materials consisting of book chapters, journal
articles, orders and such academic materials prescribed in the syllabus of a
specific course in a particular semester. Section 52 of the Indian Copy Right
Act clearly provides that "certain acts [should] not be [considered as] infringement
of copyright" and lists out the cases- those for "private use, including
research" (52 (i)) and "the reproduction of any work- i. by a teacher or pupil
in the course of instruction" (52 (h) (i)). Despite this provision the
publishers could get an order from the Delhi High Court to stop the system of
course packs. The clever terminological moves made by publishers by equating
photocopies of reading materials of a course in a university with pirate copies
in order to invoke copyright laws is symptomatic: the court mentions the
publishers arguing that the photocopy center "in a most unauthorized and
illegal manner is reproducing and issuing the publications of the plaintiffs
publications, by bringing out a compilation called as "Course Pack'" (CS(OS) 2439/2012
High Court of Delhi, p. 2). Further it
refers the "Course Packs" as the "infringing/pirated copies" so that the act of
photocopying the course readings gets placed as the act of piracy. University
from its founding moments is an institution for production and dispersal of
knowledge, and here two of the reputed university presses have become agents of
market seeking inflated compensation for damages of six million rupees. When
the rules of the game are altered in technocapitalism, what was perfectly legal
becomes illegal, what was being carried out outside the discourse of legality
becomes a prohibited and sinful act. Altered legal discourses attempt to
dictate the notions of ethics and morality in terms of profit. In the new
vocabulary such an act is "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" (Manifesto).
Doc Searls who had met Swartz
for the first time when he was twelve tries to elaborate the things using the
computing metaphor: he identifies two spaces: kernel space and user space.
Techies tend to avoid the user space and will limit their work to the kernel
space: kernel space defines the limits and pays them their salary: It is a
mammoth machine out there regulating the technology for its own needs is
converting the kernel space into user space on which techies think they don't
have any say: what Aaron challenging was the fundamental ethics that operated
at this conversion: he was actively participating in the kernel space, yet he
thought that it is his responsibility to see how kernel space becomes a user
space and how the rules of the games were altered. Profit is in the kernel
space as well as (and much more) in the conversion while politics, the question
of justice is in user space. There are codes that regulate, archive and
preserve the systemic structure of the kernel space which are variously being
called copy right laws, intellectual property rights or patent laws. There is a
frame of market which converts the kernel space into user space generating
profit. This product of this particular conversion dictates the codes
regulating how kernel space is formed and how user space is put into use. When
the former or the later proposes any alterations in the rules of the game of
this conversion, it is strictly being resisted and any effort in that direction
is rendered as cyber crime, theft, even terrorism. The last option is not an
imaginative possibility, for one can see its rhetoric was being invoked by the
US Attorney who was massively overcharging in Aaron's case where he was being
haunted by a possibility of 35 years of sentence.
It was the state
machinery which was overenthusiastic in fixing Aaron and making a
cyber-terrorist of him. Neither Jstor, from which Aaron had downloaded files,
nor MIT, which is known for its legacy of support for open sources, where they
were downloaded, were pushing the case further. Given the legacy of MIT, its
administrators' decision to involve the Federal law enforcement in the case
should make the concerned to remember the ideals for which the institute had
stood for: the decision was the crime against the institutional ethics and
integrity. Fundamentally Aaron's death was not a suicide; it was a state
killing: killing needn't mean merely stabbing; making one's life unlivable is
also an act of killing.
There is a story that
Bernard Stiegler retells in the first volume of Technics and Time: it is a pre-Platonic tragic Greek myth recounted
in Plato's Protagoras. It tells how,
when it was decided to create living creatures, Gods charged Prometheus and
Epimetheus with the task of equipping them and allotting suitable powers (dunameis) to each species. Epimetheus,
which means "forgetfulness", "thinking backward", "hindsight", "reflection"
(and Heidegger reminds that "memory thinks back to what is thought", where by
this backward movement- reflection, being central to thinking), requests
Prometheus to allow him to carry on the task himself and says, "when I have
done it, you can review it". To each species he gave qualities to balance out
the interplay of the species; but when at last he came to the human, Epimetheus
found that he had forgotten to reserve any dunameis:
the day had come when man too had to emerge from within the earth. Therefore
Prometheus, being at a loss to provide any means of survival for man due the
fault that had been committed, stole from Hephaestus and Athena the gift of
skill in the arts together with fire and bestowed them on man. This skill, tekhne", technic, consequently elaborated
into technology, constitutes the human. It is here the zootechnological
relation of man to matter emerges. So to be human is to inherit the fault of
Epimetheus (and of Prometheus as well- an originary double fault- of forgetting
and of stealing, which Stiegler calls as a default
of origin: "there will have been nothing at the origin but the fault, a
fault that is nothing but the de-fault of origin or the origin as de-fault")
and to be inextricably bound to technics.
With technology
fundamentally constituting the human through a convergence of promethean and epimethean moments- of foresights and hindsights, its prohibition
is a de-humanising act by itself. One should be aware of the attempts to snuff
out one's fundamental right to live as a human being. Swartz was one of those
activists who were creating such awareness and resisting such attempts.
References:
Steigler, Bernard. Technics
and Time-1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George
Collins. California: Stanford UP, 1998.
Swartz, Aaron. Guerilla
Open Access Manifesto. Italy: July 2008, accessed on 24 Jan 2013.
Swartz, Aaron. How We Stopped
SOPA. Washington DC: May 2012, accessed on 24 Jan 2013
The Chancellor, Master and Scholars of the University of
Oxford and others Vs. Rameshwari Photocopy Services and ANR. No CS(OS)
2439/2012. High Court of Delhi, 14 August 2012.
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