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recent bookmarks from jmThe Rise of Pirate Libraries2016-04-22T16:04:11+00:00
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-rise-of-illegal-pirate-libraries
jmToday’s pirate libraries have their roots in the work of Russian academics to digitize texts in the 1990s. Scholars in that part of the world had long had a thriving practice of passing literature and scientific information underground, in opposition to government censorship—part of the samizdat culture, in which banned documents were copied and passed hand to hand through illicit channels. Those first digital collections were passed freely around, but when their creators started running into problems with copyright, their collections “retreated from the public view,” writes Balázs Bodó, a piracy researcher based at the University of Amsterdam. “The text collections were far too valuable to simply delete,” he writes, and instead migrated to “closed, membership-only FTP servers.” [....]
There’s always been osmosis within the academic community of copyrighted materials from people with access to scholar without. “Much of the life of a research academic in Kazakhstan or Iran or Malaysia involves this informal diffusion of materials across the gated walls of the top universities,” he says.
]]>pirates pirate-libraries libraries archival history russia ussr samizdat samizdata academia papershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ec56f81da810/