This audio production was made in collaboration with Audible Anarchist
Guerilla open access manifesto
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 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 then 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 will, 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 Schwartz July 2008 Eremo Italy
This has been a production of Audible Anarchist you can find more Audible Anarchist on YouTube
