"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"