*Fair use. For several thousand people at once.
(...)
I wrote an email one day that said this:
“Are you looking for a specific out-of-print or otherwise difficult-to-find text? Respond to this email by June 21 with your request…AAAARG will then compile all of the requests into one batch, send it out to the mailing list and – hopefully – some one of the 3300+ subscribers will be able to find it for you. (no promises)”
And I don’t know how many requests came in, but it was in the hundreds. So I compiled a bunch of them into an email and sent it out. It was only hours before they were being fulfilled.
From there, some people began using “discussions” as a way of making individual requests, with many people fulfilling requests that others make. And in the next 4 months the list went from 3300 people to 12000 people.
It’s become a really popular academic resource at this point. (((Yeah, I would guess.)))
Given all the activity, I’m curious about its sustainability.
I don’t think it’s sustainable, but file sharing is resilient. That part is sustainable if what’s meant is something that will weather bad economies, legal threats, changes in technology, etc. AAAARG probably won’t. But I don’t think it matters; it’s not trying to be the new library. That said, I don’t think it will disappear, I don’t think anything ever does. The word promiscuity for the digital object I think is a really good one. (((Irrepressible, resilient, Favela Chic promiscuity, yup, that would make sense. Especially among the English faculty.)))
So what specifically is threatening the site? Is it legal problem or economic?
Verso posted a cease and desist letter yesterday, one legal threat. But mainly the problem has been economic/technological. It has no institutional support. No one has given it money. People offer to contribute money, but I always say no, which in a way supports the emphasis on sharing and distribution and exchange of knowledge. (((Occasionally I get an email from some high school teacher demanding, "Can I copy and print this for my class?" Hard to imagine how much time and opportunity I've lost being cordial to these IP martinets.)))
I think AAAARG is going to be something quite different soon, especially if the cost goes up to $200/month, or if a flood of cease and desist letters come in. The other cease and desist letter was from OMA, Koolhaas. Two letters in five years, is really remarkable I think. I mean I totally understand why there’s been so little protest: as someone who has written a couple things for magazines or in book chapters, I want people to read them!
I think pdf readers are going to be another real problem because they will demonstrate that pdfs are a market, a useful copy of the real thing. (parenthetically, I love when people upload highly personalized scans. I much prefer these to fresh ebooks). As ebook readers demonstrate a market, then sites like AAAARG become intolerable because they sit right in the middle of that market and maybe demonstrate how that market is built through the production of scarcity and highly controlled supply. But like I said it never goes away. People have been scanning and sharing books for a long time.
And what now that you’ve received the Verso letter?
My response was “Of course we’ll comply. Cease and desist letters are no joke, especially when backed by 3 million per year in sales.” I’m in the camp that it’s not only about copyright, so I’m not going to refuse to budge. It’s about sharing and exchange of knowledge, so if someone asks that I take it down, I will. But I wish it were the author who would ask. I prefer to think more about the desires of authors and readers. Publishers have other stakes.
(((Authors don't have the time or resources to pursue their pirates. To ask this is unrealistic. Besides, authors themselves are quasi-pirates who swap unpublished manuscripts with each other, and get deluged in freebie books from acquaintances.)))
AAAARG can be analyzed both from a copyright angle – who else is getting away with sharing copyrighted material on the web? (((more people than vote, that's for sure))) and from a peer exchange perspective, the network that grew around it. But it’s the way these issues are related that could be interesting to analyze more…
There’s obviously nothing natural about property, copyright, restrictions placed on distribution, etc. The kind of sharing that people find themselves wanting to engage in, if it becomes normalized, can suggest possibilities for other ways of thinking about these things (which don’t always rely on cease and desist letters, defensive postures, and territoriality). (((Some "other ways of thinking about these things" might well be HORRIFIC ways, like Jaron Lanier's new vision of civilization collapsing from cheesy ad-supported hive minds as the creative intelligentsia are ritually starved to death.))))
That’s why I’m also more enthusiastic about taking a positive approach to all of this – its not about fighting copyright or standing up to publishers or something, because at the root of it all, I hope we’re all on the same side, which is to say that we’re interested in the dissemination of ideas, in the possibilities for them to change the way people think and to help imagine a better world, and so on. (((In other words, we're all on the same side because we all want to stay warm and cozy, so that's why it's okay that me and my friends are quietly sawing up and burning part of your house. Come on, you weren't using it anyway... be honest! And on the subject of strict adherence to unworkable intellectual property structures, why don't you MICROPAY ME RIGHT NOW for blogging this interview that I just semilegally cut and pasted from this academic peer-network guy? Yeah, YOU, Mr and MS Freeloading Blog Reader! I hope I don't get a cease and desist letter about quoting this guy's troubles with cease and desist letters.)))
We look for opportunities to together develop theories and ways of understanding the really complicated situation that we’re in. (((I love those. "Big old loose rocks are falling on my head" –> Gothic High Tech. "I can't build anything that will last around here" –> Favela Chic.)))
Several authors have written in support. A lot of authors aren’t exactly happy by the artificial scarcity imposed by academic publishing, and it’s not like they see a whole lot of money from it either. (((There are some societies where the secret police actively persecute authors and authors STILL don't shut up.)))
Do you have any intention for AAAARG that hasn’t yet been realized? It’s interesting to speculate what it could become, if it could grow unfettered.
What do you think? ...
