Re: <nettime> aaaaarg lawsuit digest

[Cory Salveson <corysalveson@gmail.com>]

   Kudos to you, Doug, for speaking up. This has always been my own
   concern with aaaaaarg, even as I've taken a lot of joy in seeing it
   evolve over the years.

   Aaaaaarg is a brilliant vision of a possible and very desirable future
   for knowledge production, in many other ways than the one you
   highlight. By "unbundling" the academic library from academic
   institutions, it solves or improves upon so many challenges of
   traditional academic research labor: easy access to (hypothetically)
   everything, even and especially the obscure (not least because users
   upload scans of things not yet otherwise digitized or in print); full
   text search with unrestricted copy-pasting; strong combination of site
   features and community practice around curation of collections; a
   self-critical community... But it happens at the expense of individual
   laborers like yourself, without their/your consent and without
   compensation to those individuals/you. So, I for one think aaaaaarg is
   doing something important, but I've always assumed it's more a proof of
   concept for something that will come after than a pirate utopia to be
   defended and protected as such. It's a glimmering dream we don't quite
   deserve yet if we're not willing to pay for it in something besides
   aspirational coding, scanning, and tagging. Arguments about the justice
   of e.g. Elsevier getting paid for academic books, or the justness of
   capitalism itself, are important to debate but are beside the point if
   that debate relies on the further belittling of individual authors. The
   issue is more, then, that where internet fantasies of totally free
   music, movie, and software sharing all now have viable, legitimate
   alternatives (digital libraries and markets as well as digital media
   accessible for free through libraries, such as through OverDrive and
   Freegal in the United States), there is no such thing as a
   mass-market-priced alternative for academic books and content. Scribd's
   confusing, gray-area mutations over the years are not quite up to
   snuff.


   On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 1:29 PM Doug Henwood <[1]dhenwood@panix.com>
   wrote:

     > On Jan 12, 2016, at 9:41 AM, [2]sebastian@rolux.org wrote:
     >
     > You're probably worrying too much about the
     > big corporations that actually own IP, and almost certainly not
     > enough about the small authors that hallucinate IP.

     I've got a new little book about Hillary Clinton and it's already up on
     aaaaarg, or however many fucking a's it requires. I'm a writer and I
     hope to get paid for my work. It's how I pay my bills. "Small authors"
     aren't exactly thriving and this isn't helping. So fuck this piratic
     sense of entitlement.

     Doug Henwood

     author of My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency
     [3]http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/my-turn-by-doug-henwood/
 <...>

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